First image on the web was….

First image on the web was….

Today we have web 2.0 with so much stuff on it. But there was time when all this began and even images were a novelty. The story of the first image served on the world-wide-web (WWW) is pretty interesting. People involved did not realize the significance of what they had done!

Silvano de Gennaro gave a friend this picture below and it became the first on the web.

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”. I had only a vague idea of what that was, but I scanned some photos on my Mac and FTPed them to Tim’s now famous “info.cern.ch”. 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!”


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