First Photo Uploaded Online Turns 20
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| This was the first photo ever uploaded on the Web. |
The first photo on the Internet was a garishly Photoshopped image of four women in party dresses, inclining their shoulders toward the camera. Sounds like every photo on Facebook, Gizmodo noted. Vice magazine's Motherboard has the full history, which involves CERN, nerdy science songs and the first time the Web was used for fun.
The image was uploaded July 18, 1992, at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), home of the Large Hadron Collider. The women featured were CERN administrative staff and girlfriends of CERN scientists who formed a comedy group called The Horrible Cernettes, singing lyrics like "You said I'd be yours 30,240,000 seconds a year / Including leap years, which means 86,400 extra every four" and "You never spend your nights with me / You don't go out with other girls either / You only love your collider." According to Motherboard, they were taking the European physics community by storm at the time.
The Cernettes ended up in the Internet's first photo because Tim Berners-Lee, one of inventors of the World Wide Web, worked at CERN and needed a photo to test the latest version of the network, which could support photos. An IT developer at the facility, Silvano de Gennaro, was a Cernette fan and had just created this image for the cover of the Cernettes' next CD. He used version one of Photoshop, Motherboard reported.
At the time, CERN's Web offerings included only physics work for other labs to see. "So it was kind of a revolution to say, 'Now let's do something fun with it,'" CERN Web programmer Jean-François Groff told Motherboard.
Sources: Motherboard via Gizmodo
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