It's certainly come a long way since its origins. Not many people
realize it, but it started life as a series of postings called "The List"
in rec.arts.movies circa 1990 by Andrew Krieg, who maintained
a list of actresses and the movies they'd been in. It was often
described at the time as the "actresses I'd most like to pork" list.
Krieg denied that that was the reason for the list, but he also
admitted that the women on the list were "lookers".

Anyway, Col Needham, the founder of the IMDb thought this
was basically a good idea, and started doing a similar list for
male actors and dead actors and actresses. Then others started
keeping lists of Directors, Cinematographers, and so on. Then it
was just a matter of waiting for WWW to be invented.

-- jayembee