At the time, Facebook had not yet been invented and would be at least another decade away. It was a period when the concept of Instagram, a photo-sharing network, was still in its infancy. The Internet hadn’t even been invented yet at the time. The first photo was posted to the Internet exactly 24 years ago, on July 18, 1992.
Tim Burners Lee, the man who created the World Wide Web, uploaded the snapshot of four stylish women. Les Horrible Cernettes, or the Horrible CERN Girls, was the name of an all-female comedy band the four ladies were a part of. Switzerland’s European Organization for Nuclear Research employees founded the self-described “high-intensity rock band” (or CERN). Silvano de Gennaro, a computer science analyst at CERN, snapped this picture at the Hadronic Festival on July 18, 1998. Burners Lee, a computer scientist, was a coworker of his.
Right before the four women took the stage at the event, a “promotional” shot was taken.I find it hilarious that this image has become so ubiquitous on the Internet thanks to social networking sites like Facebook and blogging platforms like Word Press. It was simply a bunch of females being females. In response to a request to pose, we obliged.Michele de Gennaro, a member of the band, told The Telegraph in 2012 that the band had several firsts to its name. As the “first band on the web,” The Cernettes were formed in 1990.
The History of the First Web Photo
Today CERN, the most awe-inspiring scientific institution globally, released photographs of its recently rebuilt Large Hadron Collider. For some reason, it brings up memories of how far CERN has come since the first time it put photographs online about 25 years ago. Let’s say they weren’t all that scientific.We’re led to assume that’s the picture in the article. Les HorriblesCernettes, a spoof pop band about particle physics fronted by CERN 3D graphics artist Michele de Gennaro, used the image as a promotional shot.
CERN’s IT developer and Michele’s then-boyfriend, Silvan de Gennaro, used a Canon EOS 650 to shoot the shot backstage at the Hadronic Music Festival in 1992. Later, in the first version of Photoshop, he added the pink Cernettes images to the image. At the time, the nerd-girl doo-wop band was a joke amongst musicians. So de Gennaro didn’t anticipate his shabby record cover to impact the globe profoundly.
A Little Web History
There are many reasons why it is important to know how and why the web was created to comprehend why its first photograph was so significant. On December 20, 1990, while working as a software consultant at CERN, Tim Berners Lee came up with the idea for the project. Web developers started with a modest goal: to make it easier for researchers to use lab computers. That’s what it did at the beginning.
The World Wide Web initiative was the focus of the first-ever website (see above). The site included information on everything from the technical aspects of the project, such as how the HTML format operated, to the team members participating. A NeXT desktop machine was used to host everything. A cautionary note appears on the half-destroyed white sticker, which reads as follow:
Although there are no images of the original page, Berners Lee’s PC would have looked like this:Web-based physics research was a major focus for the first few years of the web’s life cycle. Things began to shift when technology began to enable more than just simple text.
Tim Berners-Lee was an Admirer
De Genarro took the Cernettes shot on July 18, 1992. When was Berners Lee working on software that would allow GIF pictures to be shown on the web? Berners Lee requested a few scanned images from Silvio de Gennaro, who was sitting nearby while working on his web project.
If you’re expecting the first photo on the web to be historical, perhaps an image was taken by a well-known photographer, you’d be wrong. Instead, de Gennaro gave up the Cernettes’ record cover that he’d designed. As a fan of the band, Tim Berners Lee decided to use the Cernettes as the first photo to be uploaded on the Internet.
An Indicator of Things to Come
However, we know that this photograph, named Les Horribles Cernettes, was the catalyst for a sea change in internet usage. It turns out that the choice of an image—pretty women who appear to be beautiful—was prophetic, as it turned out.The web has been a significant forum for physicists to share data up to that moment.
Credit: Image by Router Ctrl
On the other hand, Berners Lee became convinced after seeing how widely utilized the app was in the physics community that it could be used for much more than research. Why did he start playing around with photography?
It was Berners Lee’s goal to make the web more enjoyable. Do you have any suggestions? Pictures of attractive women who are posing for the camera. “Sex is a commodity that can be bought and sold!” According to Berners Lee, Jean-François Groff advised him on which photograph to post at the moment. “It’s the media. People will notice the media if you put a beautiful female in it. What’s going on around the beautiful girl? Sure.”
