2012 marked the 20th anniversary of the first email attachments, and the first photo on the world wide web...
Les Horribles Cernettes
nowiknow.com
When we think about the multimedia experience that the web is now today, we lose sight of its more humble beginnings. Originally conceived by British computer scientist and CERN researcher Tim Berners-Lee in 1989, the web made its debut on December 25, 1990. But that rudimentary system consisted of (and was defined as) a web browser, a single web server, and a few web pages — and, more importantly, they were not publicly accessible. It would not be unveiled to the public until August of the following year when Berners-Lee and his student, Robert Cailliau, announced their “World Wide Web” project on an online newsgroup. And even then, the existing web pages were text documents (or more accurately, hypertext documents) which users could navigate through via links. There were no images.
That changed on July 18, 1992 or thereabouts. According to Silvano de Gennaro, the photographer of the picture above (and later, the husband of one of the Cernettes), Berners-Lee asked him “for a few scanned photos of ‘the CERN girls’ to publish on some sort of information system he had just invented, called the ‘World Wide Web.’” Not knowing the future levity of this “World Wide Web” thing, he happily obliged, scanning the photos in and sending them to Berners-Lee’s machine. (And via FTP at that — email attachments were only a few months old then.) Berners-Lee put the photograph on a web server and the rest is history. |
