Slashdot Mirror
The First Image Published on the Web
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.""
Gasp! Girl geeks! Be still my beating heart!
Vital measurments: 503px by 400px w00-w00!
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Was those same women with their clothes off.
Is that more painful than passing a kidney stone?
The Spoon
Updated 6/28/2011
One word: Cleavage
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
A girl band singing about physics?! It's a nerd's dream come true.
Sigs are for the weak.
it's a no brainer that the first photo on the web is of seductively posed young women
that's been the basis of the web ever since
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
http://musiclub.web.cern.ch.nyud.net:8090/MusiClub /bands/cernettes/firstband.html
And then it was posted to Slashdot. Well, it had a good run.
~Lake
slows to a halt as four thousand nerds all simultaneously click "Submit" on their joke about nerdy girls in a band.
Sigs are for the weak.
And of course, the picture is loading about as fast as it would have when the web was first invented.
Mirror here.
Welp, I had an Abaton 300 DPI SCSI scanner on my PC that was originally a Mac scanner. That was back in 1991 or 1992. Back when Everex (who owned Abaton) was still alive. It was a three-pass monstrosity that overheated on the third pass half the time, resulting in red streaks down the image.
I remember selling scanners for Macs years before people on PCs were interested in them back in the late 1980's and early 1990's.
Boobies never hurt anyone. - Sherry Glaser.
I mean, this information was known for what, 12 years?
Mosaic didn't support JPG initially either--just GIF and some obscure X bitmap file (xbm?). JPG support came later with Netscape and latter versions of Mosaic.
Surely the first image to appear in a web browser was one during the development of the browser. You don't just chuck in some code and wait for your users to tell you if it loads images or not. Images would have been one of the first things tested.
Even the standards for displaying the images were thought up and hopefully tested long before the first image compatable web browser was made.
I am using Lynx, you insensitive clod!
I'd Hit it!!!
Oh, wait. Crap. Wrong website.
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)
C'mon, baby, let me show you my pointer.
Uh, that dangling pointer?
/ducks :)
cpghost at Cordula's Web.
chugga chugga chugga chugga chugga chugga zip
chugga chugga chugga chugga chugga chugga zip
chugga chugga chugga chugga chugga chugga zip
ooh, yeah baby, that's it
chugga chugga chugga chugga chugga chugga zip
chugga chugga chugga chugga chugga chugga zip
a little more
chugga chugga chugga chugga ding ding ding ding
I'd hit it....
Wait, isn't this Fark?
Was anybody else even slightly scared that they were going to get Goatse?
(oh: sweet open-sourced information! Get some while it lasts!)
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.
My Greasemonkey scripts for Digg &
The first web browser was on NEXTSTEP (now called OS X), which supported jpeg natively. If you support images at all using NEXSTEP's built-in objects (I assume it was NSImage then as now), you automatically get jpeg support. You'd have to pretty much have some reason not to show jpegs if you weren't going to include support for them, unlike Netscape (nee Mosaic) where the developers had to add in all the formats you wanted individually (graphics format support wasn't all that advanced back then under most Unices, as Rasterman wouldn't start on imlib for about 4-5 years).
I remember back in the day when people collected images for the mere sake that it looked cool to have a semi-recognizable picture on a computer screen. I can clearly recall calling my parents from the other room to look at Captain Kirk in EGA color and them not being at all as impressed as I was. Or when VGA hit, balloons, and those images of the rose, the clown, and that girl with the hot lips were on every single floppy shareware disc.
Those were weird times. Downloading images from BBS's merely because it was cool to have your monitor display images.
Has anyone ever come across an archive of those old BBS EGA/VGA images?