Web’s First Photo: CERN’s Quirky Legacy

Behold the pixelated pioneer above: the very first photograph—slightly tweaked, mind you—ever shared on the World Wide Web. This isn’t just any photo; it’s a grainy glimpse of the Cernettes, a playful comedy band from CERN, the Swiss laboratory where particles smash to unlock secrets of the Universe’s earliest moments and where, back in the early ‘90s, the web itself sparked into existence.

The story kicks off on 18 July 1992, at a lively Cernettes gig. Before the band hit the stage, their manager, Silvano de Gennaro, grabbed his camera, hoping to capture a shot worthy of their next CD cover. Here’s the original snap:

Fast forward a bit, and Tim Berners-Lee, the web’s visionary creator, came knocking. He needed a test image to push his latest web upgrades to the limit. Enter de Gennaro, who’d been experimenting with a scanned .gif of that 18 July photo on his trusty colour Macintosh, wielding the first-ever version of Photoshop. Back then, the .gif format—barely five years old—was a game-changer, compressing colour images without grinding computers to a halt.

“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 passed the file to Jean-François Groff, a coder on the web project, who was thrilled to tinker with it. The upload? As simple as saving a Word document, Groff later said. No fanfare, no fuss—just a quick post on a CERN page about musical acts.

This quirky photo, in its own humble way, foreshadowed how we’d come to use images online: shared among friends, capturing fleeting moments, perhaps jazzed up with a playful Photoshop flourish. It’s not a masterpiece, but it’s perfectly, gloriously right—a snapshot that launched a billion uploads.