In the 1980s, a new era began, with the adoption of MIM by the National Library of Medicine as the test bed for the development of IRx (Information Retrieval Experiment), a method of authoring and editing that permitted the rapid search of specific text material.16 An online version of the 6th edition of MIM (1983) with updates and with the IRx search engine was demonstrated at the Bar Harbor Medical Genetics Course in July 1985 and was used as a resource at the eighth Human Gene Mapping Workshop in Helsinki in August 1985. By the fall of 1985, an online version of MIM, now called “OMIM,” with the IRx search engine became a major aid in authoring and editing OMIM. Searchability helped to avoid duplications and inconsistencies and allowed entries to be related to each other—cross-referenced—more easily. Beginning in September 1987, OMIM was made generally accessible on the Internet from the Welch Medical Library of Johns Hopkins University. The informatics aspects of OMIM were transferred to the NCBI of the National Library of Medicine on December 1, 1995. Thus, in the 31 years from 1964 to 1995, MIM went from a solitary resource on magnetic tape to a cornerstone genetics resource on the World Wide Web, integrated with other primary genetic data sources. OMIM was one of the first electronic resources to exploit the advantages of the Web.