The first photo uploaded to the Internet

This photo may be the first one to be uploaded onto the Internet. It is a publicity poster of the all-girl band Les Horribles Cernettes, uploaded by Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, about 20 years ago.

After Berners-Lee and his team had completed the new version of the World Wide Web that supports image files, he asked de Gennaro for a bitmap. There were already some small vector graphics online used to show charts, but they needed to try with real photos.

At that time, de Gennaro was using Photoshop on a Mac computer to process a scanned .gif image, which was this photo above. Berners-Lee added this photo to a webpage about musical events at CERN (where Berners-Lee worked), but probably very few people have seen it.

The Mac computer that stored the original .gif file of this photo was scrapped in 1998, and the original file no longer exists.