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IMDb Turns 15
An anonymous reader writes "15 years ago today, Col Needham posted some shell scripts to rec.arts.movies which allowed anyone to search lists of actors, actresses, directors, and biographies. From this humble beginning -- which predates Yahoo, Google, and even the web itself -- the IMDb has wrangled the collective wisdom of millions of submitters to become not only a top 100 website but also a standard Hollywood tool for filmmaking. IMDb is celebrating with a retrospective of the last 15 years of IMDb and movies. Congratulations to IMDb and the internet community that built it."
Google groups link: http://groups.google.com/group/rec.arts.movies/bro wse_frm/thread/47bf560d092d9314/2c3c98e25987bf44?l nk=st&q=group:rec.arts.movies+author:needham&rnum= 2&hl=en#2c3c98e25987bf44
More than just top and bottom 250 movies http://www.imdb.com/Top/
http://www.imdb.com/interfaces
http://us.imdb.com/Licensing/structure.html
http://us.imdb.com/database_statistics
The original Usenet post is here, courtesy of Google.
The Weather Underground. It existed solely as an interactive Telnet service.
The On-Line Guitar Archive is nearing 15. They say the oldest file they can find is from June 12, 1992.
Wonder if the RIAA wishes those days of sueing over midis and lyrics and sheet music had never ended, when few had the bandwidth for mp3s.
Without thinking too much about it, the mailing list sf-lovers (aka, morphed into USENET's rec.arts.sf.written) stems from about 1972 or so. When I checked a few days ago, there were still quite a few posters there: http://w3.aces.uiuc.edu/AIM/scale/nethistory.html
The RISKS list dates from 1985 or so: http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/
The comp.compilers group goes back to 1986 or so: http://compilers.iecc.com/
Why, the Hedgehog himself, of course!
There are a huge number of yeast infections in this county. Probably because we're downriver from the bread factory.
4. Required to register to even *look* at the discussions.
IMDB has what I consider to be one of the worst "discussions" on the web today. Perhaps this has gotten better since they started requiring registration, but I'm highly doubtful. The funny thing about the IMDB boards was that you could pick pretty much any thread from any movie, and within 3-5 posts it would degrade into a total flamewar. And not just a debate of the movie, or any topic, mind you... just an all out mindless flame war.
It was comic in its uselessness.
I use IMDB but I'm not a big fan. I have over 300 films under my belt and yet I have maybe a dozen listings. They demand verification of credits so I gave up on them years ago. They had two glaring errors in my listing so I contacted them both times and both times they refused to correct the mistakes until I threatened legal action. I nearly lost a job because a Producer believed the credits on IMDB were accurate and questioned my resume. I was forced to verify some of my biggest credits before he'd accept the bulk of my resume. Most put too much faith in IMDB which makes it dangerous to the working people in the industry. A friend has an academy award and to this day they refuse to acknowledge it in his bio. It's a handy but over used service given how wildly inaccurate the information can be in the listings and they aren't inclined to correct errors.