Internet is a humongous place and the number of users keep growing exponentially, week after week, month after month. It has expanded it’s reach to more than 3 billion people and serves as a very powerful platform today. Millions of images, videos, and other files are uploaded and shared on it every minute.
But do you ever wonder that when it was in its nascent stage, which was the first picture to be uploaded on the Internet?
Unlike something remarkably special, the first picture on the Internet was a promotional photograph of an all-female parody pop group called Les Horrible Cernettes. It was a comedy band founded by the employees of CERN- the European Organization for Nuclear Research.
These ladies were the secretaries and girlfriends of the scientists at CERN, located in Geneva, Switzerland.
Silvano de Gennaro, an analyst in the Computer Science department at CERN, who took this photograph, wouldn’t have imagined that it would go on to create history. He also used to write songs and play in the group’s live manifestation. The website of the band is still very much there on the web.
In 1992, Tim berners-lee, inventor of the Internet, edited this photo in version 1 of Photoshop on a colour Mac, and saved it as a Gif. file before uploading it.
When Silvano de Gennaro was asked the date the photo was published, he said, “(It was) on and off the web for a few months, until one day the GIF interface worked fine and the photo stayed on the server and became accessible to other surfers.”
This is the original photograph, without any editing.
