![Solar Flare Heading Toward Earth, Could Result in Beautiful Sky Show [VIDEO]](http://web.archive.org/web/20120714195919im_/http://5.mshcdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/125,nasa-flare.jpg)
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That monstrosity above is the ur-picture, the very first photograph — slightly doctored, apparently — ever posted to the web. The picture is of the Cernettes, a comedy band based at CERN, the laboratory near Geneva where particles collide giving us clues to the first few milliseconds of the Universe’s existence and where, two decades ago, the World Wide Web was born.
The story, as reported by Abraham Riesman at Motherboard, begins at a Cernettes concert on July 18, 1992. Before the women went onstage, the band’s manager, Silvano de Gennaro, snapped a picture of them that he hoped to use for the cover of their next CD. Here’s the original photo:
Soon after, Tim Berners-Lee approached de Gennaro for a guinea-pig image — a picture he could use to test his recent upgrades to the web. As Riesman reports:
Lucky for him, de Gennaro had been toying around with a scanned .gif version of the July 18th photo, using version one of Photoshop on his color Macintosh. The .gif format was only five years old at the time, but its efficient compression had made it the best way to edit color images without slowing PCs to a crawl.
“The web, back in ’92 and ’93, was exclusively used by physicists,” de Gennaro recalled. “I was like, ‘Why do you want to put the Cernettes on that? It’s only text!’ And he said, ‘No, it’s gonna be fun!’”
Berners-Lee handed the file off to Jean-François Groff, a programmer on the web project. He was only too happy to work with it.
The upload was simple and uneventful — uploads of anything on the early web were more like saving a word-processing doc than anything else, Groff recalled. It popped up on a page about musical acts at CERN.
The story, and the picture itself in some senses, presages a lot of the ways we use web art today — among friends, to mark a particular moment, maybe altered with a dash of light-hearted photoshopping to really make it shine. The picture may not be beautiful, but, in some ways, it’s just perfect.
Image courtesy of Silvano de Gennaro via Motherboard
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The Atlantic is a Mashable publishing partner that is a multimedia forum on the most-critical issues of our times, from politics, business, urban affairs, and the economy, to technology, arts, and culture. This article is reprinted with the publisher's permission.
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![Who is the Superhero of the Social Web? [INFOGRAPHIC]](http://web.archive.org/web/20120714195919im_/http://9.mshcdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/125,The-Hulk.jpg)
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4 ![Mobile Users Are Checking In as They Check Out of Town [INFOGRAPHIC]](http://web.archive.org/web/20120714195919im_/http://5.mshcdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/125,travel-phone-600.jpg)
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A great part of web history.
So if I copy and save this, does it mean I have a digital collectible and will it be worth anything in the future? lol
“I know it’s rare, but I’d have to download the file, print it out, and frame it. I’ll give you thirty bucks.” – Rick from Pawn Stars
How to be nostalgic about everything. Lesson #2324.
“The story … presages a lot of the ways we use web art today”
presage – verb – Be a sign or warning that (something, typically something bad) will happen.
Y’all bunch a liars! Al Gore invented the internet. It has to be true because he said it on TV. No one on TV lies, not even politicians… LOL
Actuallyyyy, I think the photo is pretty good, looks pretty vintage and makes me think of easier times when the internet wasn’t so comlicated :)
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