SV Staff

Twenty-six years ago this month, English computer programmer and obsessive movie fan Colin (Col) Needham launched the Internet Movie Database, now known as IMDb.

Stop for a moment and try to remember life before the Internet. Typewriters. Trips to the library. Looking stuff up in the Yellow Pages. A different world, right?

Twenty years ago this month Twister took home entertainment by storm when it became the first Hollywood feature film to be released on DVD. The disc went on to become top-selling DVD in 1997.

Twenty-two years ago this month, Silicon Valley startup WebTV made a noble effort to bring the internet to the big screen with the launch of a set-top box that connected any TV to the internet. Noble because the World Wide Web was a wide-open frontier with only 36 million users worldwide. (Today, more than 4 billion people are online.) A good 92% of the American public had yet to even experience the internet let alone think about searching the web on their TV. Oh, and internet access in those days was via a “dial-up” phone connection.