MovieChat Forums > Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978) Discussion > The old days

The old days

posted 7 years ago by Askur
4 replies | jump to latest

The first post ever on this board?: https://web.archive.org/web/20030317131925/http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0077745/board/threads/

Some years later: https://web.archive.org/web/20100918103540/http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0077745/board/threads/

My oldest posts on this board actually go all the way back to 2004: http://www.imdb.com/user/ur3874774/boards/?uc=69#history
Weirdly enough, the titles of the posts are still there, but when you click on them, the posts themselves are long gone.

[–] RustyShackleworth 7 years ago

Interesting. But IMDB started back in 1990 so I imagine the first threads would have been in the 1990s.

Can we access the threads from that?

[–] Askur 7 years ago

This is how it looked in 1990: https://mz-prod.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/photo/file/182716/348daa0d82c0e21a851f29041b8d390f-MTIyNDM0OTQ1ODU4Njk0NDI1.jpg

I'm not sure when the message boards were introduced for the first time. I can imagine it was around 2000, but I can't really say since I didn't create an account before a few years later.

I assume there are other places on the net with copies of old websites than Wayback Machine, which was started in 1996, even if I don't know exactly where to find them.

The oldest frontpage I could find in Wayback Machine is from 1996: https://web.archive.org/web/19961119065302/http://imdb.com/

Then there is nothing before year 2000:

https://web.archive.org/web/20001017212514/http://www.imdb.com/?

The discussion boards: https://web.archive.org/web/20001110093200/http://us.imdb.com/Boards/

It also says:

Special Boards

Besides the boards listed here, we've implemented a special system of boards to discuss specific movies and TV shows. Because there's a board for every title and we catalog information on over 200,000 titles, there is no index of those boards. To reach them, look up the title you want to discuss (using the "Search the database for" form that can be found in the upper left of every page) and scroll down the page. Near the bottom of the page you'll find a heading that says "Message Boards" and a link to the message board for that particular movie, TV show, video, etc.

[–] RustyShackleworth 7 years ago

OK, thanks. I think the earliest I have posted here was in 2001. So it was just a crude looking database in the 1990s.

What evil drives the Car? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PoAD3kUmN9s

[–] Askur 7 years ago

Yes, but when the message boards were first released, I have not been able to find out. Probably somewhere between 1998 when it was bought by Amazon and in 2000 which is the page I found on Wayback Machine. But that's just guessing.

From an article in 2009:

https://techcrunch.com/2009/10/17/imdb-turns-19-yes-19-older-than-the-web-browser/

If you load up the Internet Movie Database (IMDb) today, you’ll see a new logo commemorating its 19th birthday. Yes, that’s really old for the Internet. Google, by comparison, is 11. Meanwhile, Yahoo is 14. IMDb is so old in fact, that is pre-dates the first web browsers. How?

Founder Col Needham explains the history a bit in a birthday message today. IMDb was born on October 17, 1990 as a series of Unix shell scripts to let users search the USENET group, rec.arts.movies. It wasn’t called IMDb yet (that came four years later), but it was the beginning of being able to search for movie information on the Internet.

Once the web as we now know it sprung up around the IMDb, the site became hugely popular — it’s probably the first website that I remember being addicted to when I was young. The site became so popular that its founders realized they would have to start charging visitors if they wanted to keep it up (remember, this was the mid 1990s, Internet advertising was much, much smaller than it is today). But in 1998, Amazon came along to buy the site, enabling it to stay free for users. Though they would later add IMDb Pro, a subscription-based section with more data on movies.