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The First Image Published on the Web

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the better-than-barbie-and-the-rockers dept.

rcastro0 writes "A charming picture of "Les Horribles Cernettes" was the first ever to grace a web browser window, according to Silvano de Gennaro from the CERN Music Club site. He writes 'Back in 1992, after their show at the CERN Hardronic Festival, my colleague Tim Berners-Lee asked me for a few scanned photos of "the CERN girls" to publish them on some sort of information system he had just invented, called the "World Wide Web".' As an aside, the all-girl rock band is still singing about "colliders, quarks, microwaves, antiprotons and the Internet.""

12 of 283 comments (clear)

  1. floating hand??? by sandmtyh · · Score: 3, Interesting

    who's floating hand is that on the red dress?

  2. Re:And the second image by Neil+Blender · · Score: 5, Interesting

    ctually this is how the whole porn cult started.

    I can honestly say that within an hour or two of using Mosaic for the first time way back when (1992-93), starting with 'oh, you can click on some text and it will take you somewhere else?', I was browsing porn (at work, no less.)

  3. Re:Old-skool by ackthpt · · Score: 2, Interesting
    I was tranfering pictures with fricken teletypes long before this.

    Man. I remember those. We had a stash of them on the old PDP 11. Andy Capp, a shapely woman, some other cutesy stuff. Took ages to print on Model 43 TeleTypes, but they had the best quality print.

    They probably still reside somewhere on the internet.

    --

    A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
  4. Re:Girl Band! by tweedlebait · · Score: 2, Interesting

    valence band? http://britneyspears.ac/physics/basics/basics.htm Yet the LHC girls are much cuter.

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    Firefox & /. ? Use this often:
  5. Re:What Kind Of Scanner... by javaxman · · Score: 3, Interesting
    Dude, it was 1992, not frickin' 1982... I was honestly shocked to hear an HTTP image wasn't transfered earlier. It must have been early in '92... I would have thought a black & white image would have been done first.

    What did you think those SCSI connectors were for ?

    There was a $500 or so color hand scanner, and apple sold a few scanners themselves, if I recall. Google for it if you're really curious.

    Still, an actual scanner was a rarity back in the day. I was always impressed that so many images were on Usenet...

  6. Re:Gasp! by RevDobbs · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Curious that the "first image on the web" is a JPEG with over 77 thousand colors... especially as Mosaic didn't get inline .jpg support until Spring '95, if I recall correctly.

    People looking to rewrite history should do their homework first :-)

  7. A different world! by Gil-galad55 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I worked at CERN a couple of summers ago and saw the Cernettes and other physicsfolken band play at the Hardronic festival. I have to say, it's an otherworldly experience. CERN is one of those weird meshing places where there's an overload of talent. You'll walk out of a lecture on the Standard Model and hear someone in the next room roaring through a Beethoven sonata, or pass by the terrace and see the old hands of particle physics, maybe even a Nobel laureate, chucking around a frisbee. I found it extremely inspiring.

    --

    To follow knowledge like a sinking star, / Beyond the utmost bound of human thought. ("Ulysses", Tennyson)

  8. This has to be fake by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting
    "You are looking at the VERY FIRST photo ever published on the web!"

    Except that "very first photo" is called "LHC5.jpg". No web browser supported jpeg format until Netscape.

    I call shenanigans.

    1. Re:This has to be fake by Anthony+Boyd · · Score: 5, Interesting

      You are right, that probably isn't the actual, exact file that appeared. However, look at the skin of the women: grainy, dithered. Look at the colors of their dresses: large swaths of flat color. In other words, it appears that it was a 256 color GIF at some point, and then was converted to JPEG. Now, it still could be fake on a grander scale, such as perhaps the first photo on the Web was not in fact a photo of the LHC girls. I don't know. But at the very least, this JPEG appears to be crappy enough that it's plausibe it used to be an old-skool GIF. Old browsers could display GIFs.

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      My Greasemonkey scripts for Digg &
    2. Re:This has to be fake by loconet · · Score: 2, Interesting

      loconet ~ $> lynx --dump 'http://musiclub.web.cern.ch/MusiClub/bands/cernet tes/pictures/LHC5.jpg' | strings | more
      JFIF
      Photoshop 3.0
      8BIM
      8BIM
      8BIM
      8BIM'
      8BIM
      8BIM
      8BIM
      Ad obe

      Looks like this one file was created using Photoshop 3.0 which released back in 1994. So it is either fake or resaved at around that time.

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      [alk]
  9. Re:Girl Band! by Impeesa · · Score: 2, Interesting

    As opposed to what, a physicist singing about physics?

  10. Re:img tags didn't exist then by TheRaven64 · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Tim Berners-Lee spoke out against the img tag when it was first created, because it broke backwards compatibility. The correct implementation, he argued, would have put the alt text between and tags, so that browsers that didn't understand the tag would get the alternate text automatically, while browsers that did could hide the text (or display it as a tool tip or something).

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    I am TheRaven on Soylent News