First photo posted to the World Wide Web

On 18 July 1992, Italian computer scientist Silvano de Gennaro snapped a picture of his girlfriend (now wife) Michele Muller with her comedy doo-wop band “Les Horribles Cernettes”. At the time both were working at the scientific research centre CERN, in Geneva, Switzerland. Silvano scanned the photo onto his computer and made it into an album cover using Photoshop 1.0. A few weeks later (no one remembers the exact date), Silvano’s colleague Tim Berners-Lee asked for an image to test some new features of his pet project, the World Wide Web, so Silvano sent over the picture of the Cernettes (as a gif). The original image was about 120 x 50 pixels and took more than a minute to load on a typical computer.

Les Horribles Cernettes formed in 1990, with a line-up drawn from CERN’s administrative staff and the partners of CERN scientists. The picture shows (from left to right) Angela Higney (who worked for the Red Cross), Michele Muller (a graphic designer at CERN), Collette Reilly (who worked in CERN’s accounts department), and Lynn Veronneau (a research administrator at CERN). Their songs were about scientific research and the frustrations of dating scientists, with titles such as “Liquid Nitrogen”, “Microwave Love” and “My Sweetheart is a Nobel Prize”.