If you like movies, but you’re daunted by the sheer number of films available to watch, you might consult the Internet Movie Database, better known as IMDb. It has records of over ten million titles — television episodes as well as movies. The odds are pretty good that you’ve visited it at least once; it’s in the top 50 most visited sites on the Internet. As for why I’m mentioning it here, well, it’s because IMDb was started in 1990 by Colin (Col) Needham, a computer engineer from Lancashire, England, and today is his 57th birthday.
IMDb was initially just Needham’s personal movie database, and he posted it on on Usenet. Some other folks started contributing, but only Needham stuck with it, and moved it to a website in 1993. It was originally known as the Cardiff Internet Movie Database because Cardiff University donated space on a server to host it. Needham was working at Hewlett-Packard at the time, and IMDb was just a hobby. Then in 1996 Needham formed a company and thanks to a film advertising campaign that involved IMDb (it was for the movie Independence Day), he was able to quit HP and work full-time for Internet Movie Database Ltd.
This turned out to be a good move; Amazon acquired IMDb Ltd. for $55 million in 1998 and Needham became the general manager of it as a subsidiary of Amazon. He’s still at it, and in spite of his windfall (he was the principal owner of IMDb when it was acquired), still lives modestly in Gloucestershire, England.
