In the vast world of the Web, every element we know today – from images to hypertexts – has its own history, and these stories are often intertwined with moments of great randomness. The story of “Les Horribles Cernettes” is a perfect example of this. The July 18th 1992 the photo of this band, known for making fun of physics and the scientific world of CERN (European Council for Nuclear Research), was uploaded to the world Wide Web. Because of this event, the photo of the Cernettes was for years considered the first image published on the Internet, but the reality is slightly different. Even if it wasn’t exactly the first photo ever to be shared online, it was certainly the first “personal” image to boast this record. Furthermore, it is possible to state with some certainty that that of the all-female parody pop group was the first photo of a band published on the Web.
The story behind the photo of “Les Horribles Cernettes”
To understand how it all began, we need to take a step back 1989 al CERNthe nuclear research center in Geneva, where the Italian computer scientist Silvano De Gennaro organized an internal music festival called “CERN Hardronic Festival”. De Gennaro, who at the time did not imagine the importance that this event would have, composed a song for a band created for the occasion, whose name was a tribute to the Large Hadron Collider particle accelerator: “Les Horribles Cernettes”. This group transformed into an iconic girl band who, with their 1950s hairstyles and ironic lyrics about life at CERN, began to enjoy some success in campus circles. The band, in short, became a symbol of self-deprecation for the scientific community, attracting the attention of colleagues and scientists, including that of one of the inventors of the Web, Tim Berners-Lee.
The key moment came when, one day, Silvano De Gennaro took a photo of the girls backstage. When Berners-Lee, creator of the World Wide Web, saw the image, he suggested uploading it to the network he was building for CERN. In those early days of the Web, the network served to share scientific data, and the images that circulated were almost exclusively of a technical or scientific nature. However, that photo at the Cernettes represented something different: it was fun, personal, and for the first time, a simple image of real people, taken for fun, was inserted into the context of communication on the Web. It was, therefore, a moment that marked the beginning of the opening of the Web to less formal contentcloser to everyday life and personal relationships.
Speaking of the photo taken by De Gennaro, that first version of the image was tiny by today’s standards. According to De Gennaro himself, it had dimensions that were probably around 120 x 50 pixels And “it took about a minute to load on the screen».
The one of the Cernettes was «the photo that opened the Web to life»
It is important to clarify that, from a technical point of view, the World Wide Web was not the first technology capable of displaying images, since the Web itself is not synonymous with the Internet (but it is one of the many services of the latter). Understanding this is important to understand that the one taken at Cernette was not the first photo ever to be shared on the Internet. To begin with, The Internet existed before the Web; secondly, the Web was born to allow physicists to share datawhich often included scientific images. When the photo of the Cernettes appeared on the network created by Berners-Lee, therefore, it became the first photograph without scientific purposes to be uploaded to the Web or, to use De Gennaro’s words, the one taken at Cernette «it was the photo that opened the Web to life».
