Thread: 20 years ago the first picture was posted on the Web.... and here it is.

How the first photo was posted on the Web 20 years ago

Three British singers with a Cern laboratory music group appear in the first picture posted to the World Wide Web (WWW) two decades ago, it has emerged.

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This image of the Les Horribles Cernettes was the first picture to be posted on the World Wide Web: From left: Angela Higney, Michele de Gennaro, Colette Marx-Neilsen, Lynn Veronneau. Photo: SILVANO DE GENNARO/CERN










By Andrew Hough

6:00AM BST 11 Jul 2012



The singers performed with the Les Horribles Cernettes (LHC), an all-female parody comedy group, based at the European Organisation for Nuclear Research centre, in Switzerland.

Colette Marx-Nielsen, Angela Higney, both originally from Glasgow and Michele de Gennaro, from Worcester, posed with Candian Lynn Veronneau for the extraordinary image, which became the first ever picture uploaded to the Web.

The remarkable picture was taken on July 18, 1992, by Silvano de Gennaro, an IT developer at Cern and was posted by his then colleague, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the British computer scientist who created the World Wide Web.

The "promotional" shot, taken at the Hardronic Music Festival – an annual “rock festival” held at a music club within the Geneva-based laboratory – shows the group posing in 1950s style costumes just before they walked out on stage.

Speaking on the eve of its 20th anniversary, Mrs de Gennaro, 44, told The Daily Telegraph that the picture was just "young girls, having some fun and a giggle".



Mr and Mrs de Gennaro, who split their time between France and Switzerland, were in a relationship at the time and married in 1997 after meeting when she was 19.
"It was fun, I think it was really good doing it - the picture itself was a nice image," said the mother-of-two teenage boys.
"It is nice to get the recognition for that but, of course we were just having a giggle for a split second and it has been captured in time.
"We have been singing with the band for 20 years and to be recognised for a picture, it is nice."
Mrs de Gennaro, who now teaches dance and pilates, added: "The picture comes up from time to time, but none of our friends or family have made a big deal about it.
"It is quite funny that now with Facebook and blogging that sort of picture is common place on the Web. It was just girls being girls. We were asked to 'strike a pose' and we did.
"The band gave us a chance to dress up in costume and have some fun because we were all so busy and in serious jobs."
Mrs Marx-Nielsen, now a 50 year-old voice teacher based in Nice, in the south of France, said that despite the photo’s history, some friends have failed to realise its significance.
“I kinda put it out sometimes and say, ‘well, I’m in the first photograph on the World Wide Web’ (but) people don’t really care,” the former Colette Reilly, who worked in finance at Cern, told Motherboard, a New York-based online magazine website.
“I suppose it had to be somebody and it just happened to be us.”
Neither Mrs Veronneau, who now lives in Washington and is believed to work in banking, nor Mrs Higney, in her 50s who worked for the Red Cross in Geneva, were available for comment.
Mr de Gennaro, now the head of multimedia productions at CERN, said that he had been waiting backstage with the “Cernettes”, whom he managed and whose songs he wrote.
Wanting a picture for a CD cover, he asked the four ladies to “lean in and smile” and took the picture on his Canon EOS 650.
“When history happens, you don’t know that you’re in it,” said Mr de Gennaro, who is due to take early retirement shortly and move to Mauritius.
Sir Tim, said to have been a "pantomime cross-dresser", became friends with Mr de Gennaro after discovering they who shared a love of drama.
He approached his colleague for a “guinea-pig image” which he could use to test his recent upgrades to the web.
Mr de Gennaro, 59, said he had been experimenting with a “scanned .gif version” of the photo using version one of Photoshop on his colour Apple Mac.
The format was half a decade old but he said its “efficient compression” was the best way to edit colour images without affecting his computer.
He added: “The web, back in ’92 and ’93, was exclusively used by physicists.
“I was like, ‘why do you want to put the Cernettes on that? It’s only text!’ And he (Sir Tim) said, ‘no, it’s gonna be fun’.”
Sir Tim, who would become a “big fan” of the group, passed the file to Jean-François Groff, a programmer on the web project.
It was slightly altered, with a pale blue background superimposed, and was later uploaded without any problems before being posted on a page about the musical acts at CERN.
Some experts have pointed out the image was "born with some original sins that have never quite washed away" such as poor photo-shopping and a “sex sells” pose.
Mr de Gennaro said his computer “died around 1998”, which also destroyed the original version of the file. Sir Tim was also unavailable for comment.
The “Cernettes”, founded in 1990 by Mrs de Gennaro, also claims to be the “first band on the web”.
Mrs de Gennaro, then a CERN graphic designer, said she was “tired of waiting day and night for her permanently-on-shift physicist boyfriend” and started singing about her “lonely nights”.
The group, which later comprised of other scientists, assistants and girlfriends of CERN officials, mostly sang about physics while has performed at international physics conferences and even the “World'92” Expo in Seville, Spain.
The group’s initials, LHC, would become the same as those of the Large Hadron Collider, which was later built at the laboratory.
The “Cernettes” will perform for the last time next weekend and the four members in the picture will be reunited on stage where they will pay tribute to milestone. He said the image’s “minor fame” had somewhat detracted from the group’s music.
Last week, a team of physicists at the Cern laboratory used LHC, a £6 billion piece of equipment designed to uncover the secrets of the universe, to confirm they had discovered a new particle bearing the hallmarks of a Higgs boson.

And in case you're wondering....

Surely Jesus Jobs invented the internet (iNternet really) and it was his picture that was first posted?

Are world wide web and internet the same?


History of the Internet - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

A Little History of the World Wide Web

History of the World Wide Web - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

History of masturbation - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Nurse! NURSE! Come quickly. Marmite's self-esteem levels are dangerously low ... again. Soothe his tortured soul.

Originally Posted by Hampsha

Are world wide web and internet the same?


History of the Internet - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

A Little History of the World Wide Web

History of the World Wide Web - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

History of masturbation - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

No they're not. The Web was effectively invented by Berners Lee at CERN, it ran over the existing Internet. Hence the "Cernettes".

Originally Posted by Panty Hamster

Nurse! NURSE! Come quickly.

Sounds fun.

Posted and created from a NeXT cube - and we all know who brought that workstation to the world, don't we?

And not a decent pair of tits between them !

Originally Posted by The Big Fella

And not a decent pair of tits between them

the internet has changed a lot in 20 years, hasn't it.

Miss Genarro was quite the hottie.

3 French women and a better than average looking Brit woman. Had the four researchers been Americans I doubt they would have sent the to their friends on the net. Love those French girls!

And can you show us what was the first porn picture posted on the World Wide Web?

I wouldn't have thrown them out of bed for eating cream crackers.

Originally Posted by Chairman Mao

Originally Posted by The Big Fella

And not a decent pair of tits between them

the internet has changed a lot in 20 years, hasn't it.

It most certainly has !
All the tits, ass and pussy you could ever want along with millions of wankers trying to spoil it all !

Originally Posted by Exige

And can you show us what was the first porn picture posted on the World Wide Web?

Not sure...

Internet pornography - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia