LA Weekly has a cool feature on the history of the Internet Movie Database. The part of the article I was happy to see was acknowledging the early roots of the database.

That’s a bit of an understatement considering Needham ended up transforming a small hobby into an international business. But remember, back in 1989, terms like “World Wide Web” were totally foreign. Needham joined a movie discussion group on what was then the fledgling university-linked Internet. The members were almost all American male college students, and their favorite topic was — you guessed it — who’s the most attractive actress and what movies has she been in.

Soon, the guys volunteered their private databases and actresses begat actors, which begat directors, which begat writers, which begat cinematographers, which begat plot summaries. [LA Weekly]

I remember when I was at CMU hanging out on rec.arts.movies and people discussing THE LIST. Which was this list of actresses and movies. If you search on Google Groups you can find numerous mentions of it.