It was a time when Facebook’s invention was still more than 10 years away. It was a time when the idea of Instagram, a platform meant exclusively for sharing photos was far from conceived. In fact, it was a time when photos had never been shared on the internet.
Exactly 24 years ago – on 18 July, 1992 – the first picture was uploaded on the web. The photo that captured four slickly dressed women was posted by Tim Burners Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web.
The four women belonged to an all-female comedy band called Les Horrible Cernettes – or the Horrible CERN Girls. The self-described “high energy rock band” was formed by employees at Switzerland’s European Organisation for Nuclear Research (or CERN).
That photograph was taken at the CERN Hardronic Festival by Silvano de Gennaro, an analyst in the Computer Science department at CERN, on 18 July, 1998. Computer scientist Burners Lee was his colleague.
It was taken as part of a “promotional” shot right before the four women took the stage during the festival.
Band member Michele de Gennaro told TheTelegraph in 2012It is quite funny that now with Facebook and blogging, that sort of picture is commonplace on the Web. It was just girls being girls. We were asked to ‘strike a pose’ and we did.
And that’s not the only first the band has to their name. The Cernettes, founded in 1990, also claims to be the “first band on the web”.
(With inputs from The Telegraph.)
