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The First Photo on the Web Showed a CERN Comedy Band

Abstract

The photograph usually named as the first one published on the World Wide Web is not a landscape, a portrait of a scientist, or a picture of a computer. It shows Les Horribles Cernettes, a parody girl group formed by CERN staff and partners of CERN physicists. Silvano de Gennaro took the picture on July 18, 1992, turned it into a mock album cover in Photoshop 1.0, and sent it to Tim Berners-Lee, who had asked for images to test new features of the web. Nobody recorded the day it went online.

The Band

Les Horribles Cernettes formed at CERN in Geneva in 1990. Michele de Gennaro, a graphic designer at the laboratory, sang “Collider” at that year’s Hardronic Festival, a song about the lonely nights of a high-energy physicist’s girlfriend, and a group grew around it. The line-up came from CERN’s administrative staff and from the partners of CERN scientists; later titles included “Strong Interaction”, “Liquid Nitrogen” and “My Sweetheart is a Nobel Prize”. The initials of the name are LHC, the same as those of the Large Hadron Collider.

Silvano de Gennaro, an analyst in CERN’s computing department, wrote additional songs for the group. On July 18, 1992, after the band played the Hardronic Festival, he photographed its members with a Canon EOS 650.

The Upload

De Gennaro scanned the photos on his Mac and edited one into an album cover using Photoshop 1.0. A few weeks later Tim Berners-Lee, a colleague at CERN, asked him for images to test new features of the web. De Gennaro sent the picture as a GIF of about 120 by 50 pixels. On a typical computer of the time it took more than a minute to load. He later recalled: “I scanned some photos on my Mac and FTPed them to Tim’s now famous ‘info.cern.ch’. How was I to know that I was passing a historical milestone.”

Guinness World Records lists it as the first photo posted to the World Wide Web and notes that no one remembers the exact date it went up; more cautious accounts call it one of the first. In mid-1992 many readers still reached the web through the text-only line-mode browser, which could not show the picture at all. Inline images reached a mass audience only with Mosaic in 1993.

The band gave its farewell performance at the Hardronic Festival on July 21, 2012, almost exactly twenty years after the photo. The original members reunited once, on July 15, 2017, for a concert in Geneva marking the photo’s 25th anniversary.

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