2. IMDB History
• The Internet Movie Database (IMDb) is an online
database of information related to movies,
television shows, actors, production crew
personnel, video games and fictional characters
featured in visual entertainment media. It is one
of the most popular online entertainment
destinations, with over 100 million unique users
each month and a solid and rapidly growing
mobile presence.[2] IMDb was launched on
October 17, 1990, and in 1998 was acquired by
Amazon.com.
3. • IMDb originated from a single list started as a hobby by English film enthusiast Col Needham
(founder and CEO of IMDb) in early 1987. The founding ideas of IMDb began with a posting
by Col Needham titled "Those Eyes", on the subject of actresses with beautiful eyes. On
October 17, 1990, Col Needham posted a simple software package to the USENET newsgroup
rec.arts.movies, which allowed readers of that group to create and search a basic movie and
TV database. The original database was built from the lists of credits that Col Needham and
two other readers had begun to publish on the rec.arts.movies group. Other film fans began
to participate in the collection of data on the Usenet newsgroup rec.arts.movies.
• Needham soon started a (male) "Actors List", while Dave Knight began a "Directors List", and
Andy Krieg took over "THE LIST", which would later be renamed the "Actress List". Both this
and the Actors List had been restricted to people who were still alive and working, but
retired people began to be added, and Needham also started what was then (but did not
remain) a separate "Dead Actors/Actresses List". The goal now was to make the lists as
inclusive as the maintainers could manage. In late 1990, the lists included almost 10,000
movies and television series. On October 17, 1990, Needham posted a collection of Unix shell
scripts which could be used to search the four lists, and the database that would become the
IMDb was born. At the time, it was known as the "rec.arts.movies movie database"