Back
when, in what now seems like the Bronze Age, a guy named Col Needham started
the Internet Movie Database. He was a
movie nerd who lived outside Manchester,
UK, and he
began by scribbling notes in longhand.
When he was fifteen, he got his first computer, a DYI with 256B of
memory. (You read that right, 256 bytes.)
This was the early 1980’s, so VHS had been introduced. Col
didn’t have to go to the movies to see movies, anymore. And he was still
taking notes, but now he was storing them on his computer, in a program he’d designed. The online community was primitive and insular,
Col and his like-minded
movie pals were file-trading on USENET.
He eventually wrote a searchable database, and in 1990, he published the
software for free. At this point,
websites – such as they were – were college-based, or research lab
proprietaries, and IMDb launched in July of 1993, at Cardiff
University, in Wales. It was one of the first hundred or so
websites ever curated for any
purpose, anywhere. They went mainstream
in 1995.
It’s
worth noting that IMDb was all user-based.
They were amateurs, and the database was compiled in much the same way -
if you think about it – as the Oxford English Dictionary. Ask a select group of people with an odd
enthusiasm, or Attention Deficit, to hunt up the earliest use of a word, say, or
Robert Redford’s first screen credit (Season 3 of Maverick, 1960). See, makes it
look easy.
Thirty
years ago – that long ago, and that recent – AOL began sending everybody in
Christendom trial CD’s of their dial-up software. Every two weeks, according to a recent
article in the Post, traffic to IMDb
doubled. And they started taking
ads. This was a crazy idea. Nobody understood you could monetize the Web. IMDb now averages 250 million users monthly,
one of the fifty most-visited websites in the world. (I hesitate to inform you that it’s owned
these days by Amazon.)
Back
in 1995, my public library in Provincetown, Mass., didn’t have internet, and I started going up-Cape
to Orleans, where you could use their
public library to log on to catalogues for print media, and pull up material on
the screen at will, whereas before you had to go all the way to Boston, to the
big public library on Copley Square, and research magazine and newspaper
morgues on microfilm – and you were of course confined to what they had on
file, the Boston Globe, the New York Times, the papers of record. For me, this was revelation, apotheosis, to have access to this
limitless archive. It wasn’t limitless,
really, there were probably no more than a couple of thousand gateways, if
that, open to public browsing, where you didn’t need academic credentials – and
it was an even greater revelation to stumble onto this clunky, user-generated, fan directory. It was a vanity project, or in Col Needham’s
frame of reference, an Ed Wood picture, but as far as I was concerned, a wet dream.
This,
seriously, is one of those “Let’s put on a show,” moments, Judy Garland and
Mickey Rooney trying to save the orphanage.
Col Needham and his wife Karen, and a few other dedicated goofs, made it
happen. God bless.
Here’s
the link to the Washington
Post article.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/movies/2025/02/23/imdb-internet-history-col-needham/?itid=sr_1_1d1d1435-765a-42fa-8ec6-21385c936a6d
