On August 6, 1991, the World Wide Web was presented to the public with an official page. However, the first upload of a photograph—something extremely common these days—happened a year later. One might assume that the first image uploaded to the Web (or rather, the image the world believes was the first) had some scientific importance, but it turned out to be a much more casual and unexpected photograph: that of a musical group.
They say that what is digitized can last forever. In reality, forever is much longer than we imagine, and link rot is not science fiction, but thanks to solid preservation work, today we can access (almost) all those documents published in the Web's early days. There are copies of the first page, and a good deal of information about the first Web server. We have also seen things like the first video on YouTube, but that would already be entering the so-called 'modern history' of the Web. And what about the first uploaded photo? To tell the truth, it has a very particular story...
The First Photo Uploaded to the Web... Or So We Thought
It was July 18, 1992. At that time, Tim Berners-Lee and his team had developed a new version of their system, compatible with image files. Berners-Lee approached Silvano de Gennaro (a developer at CERN), asked him for an image to run some tests, and that's how we got to the GIF edited (in Photoshop and on a Mac) that you can see above.
The women in question were part of "Les Horribles Cernettes" (LHC... get it?), a parody musical group created at CERN, which gave frequent performances at different events associated with physics and the scientific world. de Gennaro was both the "manager" and the author of some of the Cernettes' songs.
Among the songs performed by this band, "Colisionador", "Nitrógeno Líquido", and "Mi Novio es un Premio Nobel" stand out. Being a fan of the Cernettes, Berners-Lee found it "funny" that the image belonged to them, passed it to programmer Jean-François Groff, and it entered history. de Gennaro admits that at that time, the image had been seen more by people through posters than in its digital version, but after three decades, we are still talking about it.
However, the story doesn't end there: If we visit the Disclaimer section on the Cernettes' official page, we discover that they never knew what the "true first photo on the Web" was, but they did accept the title of "first photo of a band on the Web". At the same time, in that section they denounce sensationalist sites that linked Tim Berners-Lee to cross-dressing (I imagine they refer to this Motherboard post from 2012).
According to available information, the Cernettes' last performance was in 2024, but many of their songs are available on YouTube. And although they never planned it, they will forever have a place in the history of the Web.
Sources: Official page, Wikipedia
