The IPA website first went live on 25 January 1996. It was created by John Buchanan (Computing Service, University of Glasgow) and Mike MacMahon (Department of English Language, University of Glasgow). In those far-off days, over two hours could be needed to download a copy of the IPA chart – and users were warned that they would need to have at least 8MB of RAM on their computers! A revised version appeared in 2005, thanks to Jean Anderson of the STELLA Project, and Ewan MacLean, a web designer in Glasgow.
After twelve years on the Glasgow server, the IPA website moved to University College London on 1 February 2009. The new URL is http://www.langsci.ucl.ac.uk/ipa/.
The Association would like to thank the University of Glasgow and UCL for hosting the website on their servers. The Association also gratefully acknowledges the contribution of Mike MacMahon (University of Glasgow) and Michael Ashby (UCL) in maintaining the website. Credit is also due to Kayoko Yanagisawa (UCL) for assistance in the transfer of files to UCL.
The electronic archiving of the back issues of the Journal of the International Phonetic Association has been completed. The digital archive contains all articles from the first thirty volumes of the Journal (vols. 1–30, 1971–2000). It was made available online on the Cambridge Journals Online website for JIPA in February 2009.