The First Image Published on the Web

rcastro0 writes "A charming picture of "Les Horribles Cernettes" was the first ever to grace a web browser window, according to Silvano de Gennaro from the CERN Music Club site. He writes 'Back in 1992, after their show at the CERN Hardronic Festival, my colleague Tim Berners-Lee asked me for a few scanned photos of "the CERN girls" to publish them on some sort of information system he had just invented, called the "World Wide Web".' As an aside, the all-girl rock band is still singing about "colliders, quarks, microwaves, antiprotons and the Internet.""

Gasp!

[ackthpt]

"A charming picture of "Les Horribles Cernettes [web.cern.ch]"... the all-girl rock band is still singing about "colliders, quarks, microwaves, antiprotons and the Internet."

Gasp! Girl geeks! [web.cern.ch] Be still my beating heart!

Vital measurments: 503px by 400px w00-w00!

Re:Gasp!

[Tackhead]

> Gasp! Girl geeks! Be still my beating heart!
>Vital measurments: 503px by 400px w00-w00!

LHC? Hey, it gave me a hadron.

Re:Gasp!

[RevDobbs]

Curious that the "first image on the web" is a JPEG with over 77 thousand colors... especially as Mosaic didn't get inline .jpg support until Spring '95, if I recall correctly.

People looking to rewrite history should do their homework first :-)

Re:Gasp!

[Chess_the_cat]

Yeah and it's even weirder when you remember the WWW predates the graphical browser. So I guess Tim Berner's Lee posted the image but no one saw it until Mosaic was released.

Re:Gasp!

[DarkMantle]

this images does not predate image viewers.

Exactly, the site says it was the first image ever clicked on. Not viewed inline.

Re:Gasp!

[Anonymous Coward]

Mosaic wasn't the first GUI web browser. IIRC, that was Berners-Lee's browser that he wrote for a NeXT machine. He could have had .jpg support long before Mosaic.

Re:Gasp!

[EnronHaliburton2004]

Well, back in 1992 the web was mostly text. For a 217K image, you didn't view the picture inline on a webpage.

You would download the file and view the image in an external image viewer; sort of like how you would do it via FTP or Gopher.

And yes, I remember having a 1200 Baud modem, which was about as fast as the LHC is right now under the Slashdot effect :)

Torrent

[TorrentNinja]

Here is a torrent of the Geek Girls :P

Geek Girls [simplecache.com]

Peace

Re:Gasp!

[NanoGator]

"Gasp! Girl geeks! Be still my beating heart!"

From 1992? They're like old now.

Re:Gasp!

[rk]

Hey, that's okay, 'cause so am I. :D

And the second image

[Neil Blender]

Was those same women with their clothes off.

Re:And the second image

[Coneasfast]

actually this is how the whole porn cult started.
someone saw this a long time ago and thought to themself:

"hmm, why not take this new so-called 'web-image' phenomena, and do something profitable with it, something that sells, and something that will never die, hmm..."

Re:And the second image

[Neil Blender]

ctually this is how the whole porn cult started.

I can honestly say that within an hour or two of using Mosaic for the first time way back when (1992-93), starting with 'oh, you can click on some text and it will take you somewhere else?', I was browsing porn (at work, no less.)

Re:And the second image

[magefile]

And for once, it really was "for research purposes" ;-).

Re:And the second image

[Anonymous Coward]

Same here -- this guy comes over to my house and says "Hey there's a new way of getting porn where you don't have to run uudecode!!".

Re:And the second image

[drix]

The porn finds you, silly. Honestly, how long have you been on this "Internet" thing? A day? ;)

Followed by..

[ackthpt]

Was those same women with their clothes off.

Followed by the first SpyWare...

please tell us about your web surfing experience in an email, be sure to include anything you yourself have typed, such as credit card numbers, expiration dates, password, PIN numbers, and so on.

Re:And the second image

[Gromius]

bet that would give somebody a hadron... /ducks

BOOOOOOOOO!!!!

[RatBastard]

That was terrible. And I'm mad that you beat me to it.

I swear that's what I read!

[NoData]

AWWW. Damn you. I actually did misread the caption, which in actuality reads:

Back in 1992, after their show at the CERN Hardronic Festival, my colleague Tim Berners-Lee asked me for a few scanned photos of "the CERN girls" to publish them on some sort of information system he had just invented, called the "World Wide Web". ...

CERN Hard-onic festival?! Wha wha wha?!!!! I thought they were Swiss not Swedes...

But damn. The second one from the left..niiiice. Got that Susanna Hoffs thang going on.

Re:And the second image

[Tackhead]

> And the second image
> Was those same women with their clothes off.

Close, but not quite. It was those same women with their undergarments simultaneously teleported one foot to the left, in accordance with the theory of indeterminacy.

Many respectable physicists said that they weren't going to stand for such a thing, partly because it was a debasement of science, but mostly because they didn't get invited to those sort of parties.

Re:And the second image

[RevDobbs]

Sure was... if they were using IE back in '92 ::snicker::

Passed what???

[jdray]

...I was passing an historical milestone...

Is that more painful than passing a kidney stone?

Re:Passed what???

[Anonymous Coward]

But can the goatse guy pass himself? Welcome to the klein bottle version of goatse.

Old-skool

[mboverload]

I was tranfering pictures with fricken teletypes long before this.

Re:Old-skool

[ackthpt]

I was tranfering pictures with fricken teletypes long before this.

Man. I remember those. We had a stash of them on the old PDP 11. Andy Capp, a shapely woman, some other cutesy stuff. Took ages to print on Model 43 TeleTypes, but they had the best quality print.

They probably still reside somewhere on the internet.

Re:Old-skool

[nacturation]

There's this: http://www.asciipr0n.com/ [asciipr0n.com]. But I remember ones from before 1990 which you printed on a line printer and it used overtype to get a better resolution. These seem to be only for viewing on a monitor.

Re:Old-skool

[Alien Being]

chugga chugga chugga chugga chugga chugga zip
chugga chugga chugga chugga chugga chugga zip
chugga chugga chugga chugga chugga chugga zip
ooh, yeah baby, that's it
chugga chugga chugga chugga chugga chugga zip
chugga chugga chugga chugga chugga chugga zip
a little more
chugga chugga chugga chugga ding ding ding ding

Re:Old-skool

[NanoGator]

Ugh. Remember downloading porn from BBS's? One... picture... at ... a ... time. Good thing I knew where my dad's stash was.

The web, then, as now.

[NotQuiteReal]

One word: Cleavage

Girl Band!

[clean_stoner]

A girl band singing about physics?! It's a nerd's dream come true.

Re:Girl Band!

[Gromius]

and I hear they have massive bosons too :)

Re:Girl Band!

[BorgHunter]

That would be helpful in getting their phonon number. Oh wait, it's 0...

Re:Girl Band!

[ralphclark]

Yeah but they're labelled W and Z and one is rumoured to be more massive than the other.

Re:Girl Band!

[ackthpt]

A girl band singing about physics?! It's a nerd's dream come true.

The actually kinda remind me of the B-52's...

radio shack is a little old place we can get together, radio shack, bayyy-beeee!

Re:Girl Band!

[tweedlebait]

valence band? http://britneyspears.ac/physics/basics/basics.htm [britneyspears.ac] Yet the LHC girls are much cuter.

Re:Girl Band!

[mobby_6kl]

You can even sing yourself! Science songs and poems [mnsta.org]
Example:

MOMENTUM SONG
tune: "London Bridge"

Cart is going faster now, faster now, faster now,
Cart is going faster now, more momentum.

Mass has gotten larger now, larger now, larger now,
Mass has gotten larger now, more momentum.

Impulse equals F times t, F times t, F times t,
Impulse equals F times t, that's an impulse.

Impulse causes delta P, delta P, delta P
Impulse causes delta P, more momentum.

- by Jane and Jim Nelson

Re:Girl Band!

[Impeesa]

As opposed to what, a physicist singing about physics [mchawking.com]?

Re:Girl Band!

[ScruffyScrode]

A girl band singing about physics?! It's a nerd's dream come true.

So you are telling us you had a nerdgasm?

Alas

[opusman]

"How was I to know that I was passing an historical milestone, as the one above was the first picture ever to be clicked on in a web browser!"

The first picture on the web maybe, but only one of countless slashdotted sites.

of course

[circletimessquare]

it's a no brainer that the first photo on the web is of seductively posed young women

that's been the basis of the web ever since

Re:of course

[fyoder]

I used to think that Tim Berners-Lee could never have anticipated that the web would become a major porn delivery system. Now I discover he started it.

I had thought it was intended for physicists to use to share data. I suppose that could still be said to be true, and that it is just my assumptions about the nature of the data that were wrong.

Coral Cache Link...

[openglx]

http://musiclub.web.cern.ch.nyud.net:8090/MusiClub /bands/cernettes/firstband.html [nyud.net]

...and then, the unthinkable.

[LakeSolon]

And then it was posted to Slashdot. Well, it had a good run.

~Lake

Re:...and then, the unthinkable.

[CA_Jim]

On the other hand, a picture of pretty women was posted on the web for 12 years before slashdot hit them. It makes you wonder if /. crowd is slowing down.

Slashdot server...

[clean_stoner]

slows to a halt as four thousand nerds all simultaneously click "Submit" on their joke about nerdy girls in a band.

Sloooow

[Anonymous Coward]

And of course, the picture is loading about as fast as it would have when the web was first invented.

floating hand???

[sandmtyh]

who's floating hand is that on the red dress?

Re:floating hand???

[Basehart]

This photo is a fake, shot in some backlot in Hollywood.

Re:floating hand???

[theTerribleRobbo]

She has her left elbow close to her waist, and has her left hand turned outwards, you twit.

What Kind Of Scanner...

[norm1153]

...was available for Macs in '92? Color even?

Re:What Kind Of Scanner...

[RatBastard]

Welp, I had an Abaton 300 DPI SCSI scanner on my PC that was originally a Mac scanner. That was back in 1991 or 1992. Back when Everex (who owned Abaton) was still alive. It was a three-pass monstrosity that overheated on the third pass half the time, resulting in red streaks down the image.

I remember selling scanners for Macs years before people on PCs were interested in them back in the late 1980's and early 1990's.

Re:What Kind Of Scanner...

[javaxman]

Dude, it was 1992, not frickin' 1982... I was honestly shocked to hear an HTTP image wasn't transfered earlier. It must have been early in '92... I would have thought a black & white image would have been done first.

What did you think those SCSI connectors were for ?

There was a $500 or so color hand scanner, and apple sold a few scanners themselves, if I recall. Google for it if you're really curious.

Still, an actual scanner was a rarity back in the day. I was always impressed that so many images were on Usenet...

Re:What Kind Of Scanner...

[magefile]

My school has a few of those (well, the new version, made by HP). They suck, and they've replaced the wheelie bar with accelerometers that break a *lot*.

Re:What Kind Of Scanner...

[odin53]

Sure there were color scanners available for Macs and PCs in 1992. I was in highschool at the time; we were using Aldus Pagemaker to lay out the school newspaper, and we would scan pictures to place in the layout. The editor in chief had one of those handheld scanners, and the school had a flatbed, as did Kinko's.

A mirror

[James_G]

Mirror here [cracksmokingmonkeys.net].

News for nerds

[Azul]

Stuff that matters, indeed.

Re:News for nerds

[Lisandro]

Come on, have you seen the bands' lyrics?

You poured liquid nitrogen down my spine
as you told me you didn't love me any more
and run off with the girl next door
You poured liquid nitrogen in my heart
and you told me it wouldn't hurt, what a liar
You promised you'd always be true

You said you'd be mine 12 months a year, 24 hours a day
You said I'd be yours each week my dear, until the end of time
But then you found her and you left me here
To cry and to run of tears
And now here I wait 12 months a year
But I'm hopin

Eh, they suck.

[InThane]

Their home page uses the blink tag, what more proof do you need?

Torrent

[TorrentNinja]

On musiclub.web.cern.ch/musiclub/bands/cernettes/ there was a large 57MB Real Player RM file that will probably get /.'ed so I created a torrent. HERE is the TORRENT LHCLive.rm [simplecache.com] Peace

Typical /. late coverage

[Piquan]

I mean, this information was known for what, 12 years?

Re:Typical /. late coverage

[Anonymous Coward]

Just wait -- it'll be on /. again in a day or two. ;)

particular matters

[Doc Ruby]

Hardonic Festival? So the Web was actually produced for porn, and all this physics crap clogging it up is just scientists getting a free ride.

Developing Web Browsers

[n0dalus]

Surely the first image to appear in a web browser was one during the development of the browser. You don't just chuck in some code and wait for your users to tell you if it loads images or not. Images would have been one of the first things tested.
Even the standards for displaying the images were thought up and hopefully tested long before the first image compatable web browser was made.

Obligatory cheap-shot

[techno-vampire]

No it wasn't and don't call me Shirley.

Heh.

[This is outrageous!]

"The most beautiful women in the world are to be found in Geneva (and Lausanne)"

J.-L. Godard [delux.lu]

I am using Lynx, you...

[melikamp]

I am using Lynx, you insensitive clod!

Re:I am using Lynx, you...

[Tablizer]

Here's the ascii version:

/O\ /O\
-|---|--
/ \ / \

Figures

[Daath]

It was women.

The year after, when I started studying CS at the university of Copenhagen, the net was already awash with porn (ok, slightly exaggerated, but it was there and easy to find)...
Not very good quality, resolution-wise, but we got the general idea ;)

porn on the net

[Jafa]

The net had been awash with porn for years, on usenet. I think it took another week after this photo was up on the web that the web was awash with porn.

J

OMG!

[asdfasdfasdfasdf]

I'd Hit it!!!

Oh, wait. Crap. Wrong website.

How did Tim get his last name?

[bergeron76]

Did he work something out with his wife so she could keep hers?

Seriously, I've heard of women keeping Maiden names, but not men. I doubt it's a Maiden name thing, but I'm just curious how he got a hyphenated last name.

Re:How did Tim get his last name?

[nagora]

Did he work something out with his wife so she could keep hers?

In ye olden days an heiress (usually an only surviving child who happened to be a woman) would carry on the family name by splicing it with her husband's. This is also reflected in heraldry and is the origin of many quartered and "per pale" coats of arms where the two coats were combined.

Presumably, TBL is decended from one of these families.

TWW

Re:How did Tim get his last name?

[Hank Chinaski]

in most european countries you can choose:
take wifes name
take grooms name
take wife+grooms name for groom, wife keeps her maiden name
take wife+grooms name for wife, groom keeps his name
both take wife+grooms name

A different world!

[Gil-galad55]

I worked at CERN a couple of summers ago and saw the Cernettes and other physicsfolken band play at the Hardronic festival. I have to say, it's an otherworldly experience. CERN is one of those weird meshing places where there's an overload of talent. You'll walk out of a lecture on the Standard Model and hear someone in the next room roaring through a Beethoven sonata, or pass by the terrace and see the old hands of particle physics, maybe even a Nobel laureate, chucking around a frisbee. I found it extremely inspiring.

This has to be fake

[Anonymous Coward]

"You are looking at the VERY FIRST photo ever published on the web!"

Except that "very first photo" is called "LHC5.jpg". No web browser supported jpeg format until Netscape.

I call shenanigans.

Re:This has to be fake

[bonch]

Maybe it was originally a BMP, and has been converted to JPG for the purposes of displaying on that "page of history."

Re:This has to be fake

[plcurechax]

Actually all the early browsers didn't have inline attachment support. They either dumped it to a file (Save As...) or based on the MIME type (graphics/jpeg) they would launch an external application like xv [trilon.com].

Re:This has to be fake

[Anthony Boyd]

You are right, that probably isn't the actual, exact file that appeared. However, look at the skin of the women: grainy, dithered. Look at the colors of their dresses: large swaths of flat color. In other words, it appears that it was a 256 color GIF at some point, and then was converted to JPEG. Now, it still could be fake on a grander scale, such as perhaps the first photo on the Web was not in fact a photo of the LHC girls. I don't know. But at the very least, this JPEG appears to be crappy enough that it's plausibe it used to be an old-skool GIF. Old browsers could display GIFs.

Re:This has to be fake

[russellh]

recompressed do to the gif patent issue, perhaps?

Re:This has to be fake

[Rie Beam]

They said the picture was one of the first. Maybe it's the same picture, just a different compression scheme (since whatever they were using then is probably outdated, or too large for the "modern internet")?

Re:This has to be fake

[node 3]

The first web browser was on NEXTSTEP (now called OS X), which supported jpeg natively. If you support images at all using NEXSTEP's built-in objects (I assume it was NSImage then as now), you automatically get jpeg support. You'd have to pretty much have some reason not to show jpegs if you weren't going to include support for them, unlike Netscape (nee Mosaic) where the developers had to add in all the formats you wanted individually (graphics format support wasn't all that advanced back then under most Unices, as Rasterman wouldn't start on imlib for about 4-5 years).

Re:

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:This has to be fake

[loconet]

loconet ~ $> lynx --dump 'http://musiclub.web.cern.ch/MusiClub/bands/cernet tes/pictures/LHC5.jpg' | strings | more
JFIF
Photoshop 3.0
8BIM
8BIM
8BIM
8BIM'
8BIM
8BIM
8BIM
Ad obe

Looks like this one file was created using Photoshop 3.0 which released [wikipedia.org] back in 1994. So it is either fake or resaved at around that time.

Obligatory

[MagicDude]

I'd hit it....


Wait, isn't this Fark?

Les Horribles Cernettes .... ?

[ggvaidya]

Was anybody else even slightly scared that they were going to get Goatse?

(oh: sweet open-sourced information [wikipedia.org]! Get some while it lasts!)

BBC Images Were More Impressive

[superultra]

I remember back in the day when people collected images for the mere sake that it looked cool to have a semi-recognizable picture on a computer screen. I can clearly recall calling my parents from the other room to look at Captain Kirk in EGA color and them not being at all as impressed as I was. Or when VGA hit, balloons, and those images of the rose, the clown, and that girl with the hot lips were on every single floppy shareware disc.

Those were weird times. Downloading images from BBS's merely because it was cool to have your monitor display images.

Has anyone ever come across an archive of those old BBS EGA/VGA images?

Re:BBC Images Were More Impressive

[kobotronic]

I know what you mean. Golden times.
Also there were many images converted from the nice Deluxe Paint IFF images on the Amiga.

A few sites on the net appears to collect these old files. I have a modest archive with the entire contents of some BBS image folders from 1989 to 1990. Try searching for yrose.gif, clown.gif, cheetah.gif, mouse.gif - they sometimes yield a cache of these things.

http://www-vms.uoregon.edu/~sergiok/GIFS/

There's one...

img tags didn't exist then

[dananderson]

img tags didn't exist in '92. They came later with Mosaic. It was probably an anchor (<a>) tag that was required.

Mosaic didn't support JPG initially either--just GIF and some obscure X bitmap file (xbm?). JPG support came later with Netscape and latter versions of Mosaic.

Re:img tags didn't exist then

[TheRaven64]

Tim Berners-Lee spoke out against the img tag when it was first created, because it broke backwards compatibility. The correct implementation, he argued, would have put the alt text between <img> and </img> tags, so that browsers that didn't understand the tag would get the alternate text automatically, while browsers that did could hide the text (or display it as a tool tip or something).

Re:img tags didn't exist then

[sepluv]

I'm glad to hear that. This is the obvious way of doing it, and I couldn't think why on earth he didn't do it that way.

That's how it is in XHTML 2.0 anyway, so he's got his way now.

Re:Teaser

[OrangeTide]

Does this help? I'm engaged to a geek girl I met on a C Programming channel on IRC. :) And she cooks too!

Re:Teaser

[wizbit]

That must've been a fun courtship.

"C'mon, baby, let me show you my pointer."

Re:Teaser

[cpghost]

C'mon, baby, let me show you my pointer.

Uh, that dangling pointer?

/ducks :)

Teaser all right...

[TiggertheMad]

Does this help? I'm engaged to a geek girl I met on a C Programming channel on IRC. :) And she cooks too!

Oh, sweet jesus this guy is springer fodder.

Ummmm...yeah, if 'she' asks you to meet 'her' for the first time late at night at some sleazy motel off the turnpike, for the LOVE OF GOD, man, don't go.

Re:Teaser all right...

[OrangeTide]

Oh she's definitely female seeing as we've been living together for years. I wouldn't marry someone I never met in person, that's just crazy.

Re:Uhm, compression?

[droopus]

Nah, in 1992, I had already been on an HST 14.4 modem for a year (remember HST?) But you're right about the compression. 217k would have seemed enormous back then.

I mean, we had just been told by the ubergeek (ptui) that we didn't ever need more than 640k...use a third of that for one image? Nah.

Jeebus, we're talking about this like it was 50 years ago. B)

"Luxury! When I was a lad we lived in a lake!"

Re:Nothing to see here, move along

[jacksonj04]

Well, it gave me a hadron!

It's physics girls, it's 0053am, gimme a break...

Oh, come on!

[bonch]

Congratulations on one of the lamest attempts at hitting all the Slashdot talking points for karma whoring purposes. "Uh, see, this is the first image on the web, so for some reason it's a copyright violation, and somehow that ties into P2P networks, and the RIAA is evil if they're gonna try to ban that and control music and the whole web and I AM NOT A ROBOT!!"

You fail it.

Re:Oh, come on!

[enosys]

Yeah, he failed because he forgot to mention SCO