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interactive
information revolution
Thirteen years old and going from strength to strength, it’s difficult to imagine a world without the Internet Movie Database. But as founder Col Needham tells Ceri Thomas, it could so easily not have happened
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Photos: Col Needham and the home page of the Internet Movie Database website
Stephen Fry gave us that great plug in his opening speech at the British Academy Film Awards a couple of years back,” laughs Internet Movie Database founder Col Needham. “He began with a joke about the days back when there was no IMDB to look people up in. So, always happy to talk to anyone from BAFTA after that!”
And when you talk to Needham, two things very quick- ly become apparent. First, just how much of a - pretty haphaz- ard to start with - labour of love setting up the world’s biggest online database of movie facts and figures has been for him. Second, that it was born and remains based in Britain.
“I initially started IMDB as basi- cally a hobby in my spare time back in 1990,” says the Leeds University-educated computer programmer. “It’s a bit of a geeky story but it turned out all right in the end.
“In early 1990, I was involved in a discussion group that used to get together on the Internet to discuss films, and within this dis- cussion group people were always saying, ‘what film has so-
and-so been in?’, ‘who directed this film?’ ...that kind of thing.”
Soon, he and his online friends were trading lists of the films actors and actresses had been in - “at this point the Internet con- sisted mostly of US male college students, and what US male col- lege students most wanted to talk about was what other films has this gorgeous actress been in.” It didn’t take long for some- one to suggest collating them all into a database.
Needham released his data- base on to the Internet in October 1990. “We celebrated our 13th birthday last year, so IMDB is officially a rowdy teenag- er,” he says.
It was a bare-bones affair in those days, just actors and direc- tors, but it didn’t take long for it to grow.
“Before you know it, someone popped up and said. ‘I’m a real fan of directors – I’d like to man- age a list of directors for this database’. Then a writer’s fan showed up, then it was com- posers, then cinematographers, and so on. We grew like that.
“Every two or three weeks someone would turn up and say
something like, ‘this database would be great if only it had plot summaries’. And so we’d go, ‘A- ha! Perhaps you are just the per- son to manage a plot summaries section?’ We recruited people from all over the world.”
In a world of Broadband and always-on access, the following may seem rather strange, but in those days you couldn’t just log on and use the IMDB. You had to actually download the entire database on to the hard drive of your home machine before you could use it. As Needham freely admits, this was the “Internet Stone Age.”
That all changed in September 1993 when - after a friend from Cardiff University contacted him - a World Wide Web version of the database was housed on the servers of Cardiff University. For the first time, users from around the globe could easily and quick- ly access the IMDB.
“We fairly quickly filled up all the spare capacity on Cardiff University’s computer science department computer,” he says. “We advertised on the home page for someone else to host a copy. Various universities around
“It’s a bit of a geeky story, but it turned out all right in the end.”