Les Horribles Cernettes
It is amazing when we realize that there was a time when the Web was only text. In fact, HTML, the lingua franca of the Web stands for Hyper Text Markup Language and enables the links you so willingly click on today. It wasn’t until July 18, 1992 when the first photo was uploaded to the Web and the story behind why it was chosen is as fascinating as it is strange.
The photographer was Silvano de Gennaro, an IT developer at CERN who worked near Tim Berners-Lee and the other scientists who had invented the Web. de Gennaro had no idea what the Web was. He used his Canon EOS 650 to snap a picture of the four members of Les Horribles Cernettes backstage at the Hardronic Music Festival, an annual event thrown by CERN’s administrators. He planned to use the picture for their next CD cover. Tim Berners-Lee became a big fan of the Cernettes.
When Berners-Lee and his team were ready to test out a new edition of the World Wide Web that could support photo files, he went a few steps from his workstation to ask de Gennaro for a Cernettes-related image. Though the Web had already used a few small vector image files to show off schematics, Berners-Lee wanted a real photo. That’s how Les Horribles Cernettes made history.
Read the article at: motherboard.