Rotten Tomatoes is about to turn 10. In human years, that means getting bumped up the allowance pay scale and starting the painful process of weaning yourself off Raffi records. But in Internet years, turning 10 is a rarity and blessing. Few sites live to see it, and we couldn't have done it without readers like you. Let us regale you now with the top 10 things you never knew about this humble site, and pay tribute to the people who saw an untamed Internet wild and said, "Yeah, needs more quote bubbles."

10. Rotten Tomatoes founder Senh Duong was inspired while looking for reviews of Jackie Chan flicks -- Rumble in the Bronx, Supercop, Twin Dragons, and First Strike. Initial RT design took two weeks to color and code, with the blurb-centric presentation of reviews inspired by a newspaper ad for 1993's In the Line of Fire. Says Senh: "The ad had what must have been over fifty something blurbs from critics."

9. Senh originally wanted a "Thumbs Up/Thumbs Down" rating system in tribute to Siskel & Ebert. Legal reasons (and lack of domain availability) put the kibosh on that.

8. RT's first day drew 100 readers. Within the week, the site was featured on Yahoo!, USA Today, Netscape.

7. First known televised mention of Rotten Tomatoes: The Daily Show with Jon Stewart when Mark Ruffalo was a guest. Ruffalo didn't know what he was talking about.

6. Rotten Tomatoes raised $1 million in venture capital in 2000, enabling the company to weather the dot-com burst, though the staff had to be reduced from 20 to 8. As of June 2008, staff head count is 14.

5. There were once plans for Rotten Tomatoes to expand into book and car reviews. Reviews for adult films were also briefly entertained. The working name: Pink Tomatoes.

4. Before our reviews expanded into the vast database it is today, old reviews were added manually. When The Phantom Menace came out, RT staff raided library newspaper archives and uploaded every Star Wars review through an optical character recognition machine.

3. Locations Rotten Tomatoes has called home: an apartment in downtown Sacramento, an office down the street from Pixar in Emeryville, a business complex in San Francisco shared with IGN, and the MySpace building in Los Angeles.

2. Each movie's Tomatometer was originally calculated by hand.

1. While throwing rotten tomatoes at lousy entertainment harkens back to vaudeville days, Senh admits the Jean-Claude Lauzon film Leolo served as a major inspiration. It features a woman who is impregnated by a tomato.