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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.""

23 of 283 comments (clear)

  1. Gasp! by ackthpt · · Score: 5, Funny
    "A charming picture of "Les Horribles Cernettes"... 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
    1. Re:Gasp! by Tackhead · · Score: 5, Funny
      > Gasp! Girl geeks! Be still my beating heart!
      >Vital measurments: 503px by 400px w00-w00!

      LHC? Hey, it gave me a hadron.

    2. 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 :-)

    3. Re:Gasp! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Mosaic wasn't the first GUI web browser. IIRC, that was Berners-Lee's browser that he wrote for a NeXT machine. He could have had .jpg support long before Mosaic.

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

    Was those same women with their clothes off.

    1. 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.)

    2. Re:And the second image by Gromius · · Score: 5, Funny

      bet that would give somebody a hadron... /ducks

    3. Re:And the second image by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

      Same here -- this guy comes over to my house and says "Hey there's a new way of getting porn where you don't have to run uudecode!!".

  3. Passed what??? by jdray · · Score: 5, Funny
    ...I was passing an historical milestone...

    Is that more painful than passing a kidney stone?

    --
    The Spoon
    Updated 6/28/2011
  4. The web, then, as now. by NotQuiteReal · · Score: 5, Funny

    One word: Cleavage

    --
    This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
  5. Girl Band! by clean_stoner · · Score: 5, Funny

    A girl band singing about physics?! It's a nerd's dream come true.

    --

    Sigs are for the weak.

    1. Re:Girl Band! by Gromius · · Score: 5, Funny

      and I hear they have massive bosons too :)

  6. Coral Cache Link... by openglx · · Score: 5, Informative

    http://musiclub.web.cern.ch.nyud.net:8090/MusiClub /bands/cernettes/firstband.html

  7. ...and then, the unthinkable. by LakeSolon · · Score: 5, Funny

    And then it was posted to Slashdot. Well, it had a good run.

    ~Lake

  8. Slashdot server... by clean_stoner · · Score: 5, Funny

    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.

  9. Sloooow by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    And of course, the picture is loading about as fast as it would have when the web was first invented.

  10. Typical /. late coverage by Piquan · · Score: 5, Funny

    I mean, this information was known for what, 12 years?

  11. I am using Lynx, you... by melikamp · · Score: 5, Funny

    I am using Lynx, you insensitive clod!

    1. Re:I am using Lynx, you... by Tablizer · · Score: 5, Funny

      Here's the ascii version:

      /O\ /O\
      -|---|--
      / \ / \

      --
      Table-ized A.I.
  12. OMG! by asdfasdfasdfasdf · · Score: 5, Funny

    I'd Hit it!!!

    Oh, wait. Crap. Wrong website.

  13. Les Horribles Cernettes .... ? by ggvaidya · · Score: 5, Funny

    Was anybody else even slightly scared that they were going to get Goatse?

    (oh: sweet open-sourced information! Get some while it lasts!)

  14. 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.

    --
    My Greasemonkey scripts for Digg &
  15. Re:This has to be fake by node+3 · · Score: 5, Informative

    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).