What’s the first picture ever posted online?

At the dawn of the internet history…

Yes, the internet has been around for a while now, from 1991 to be more precise and millions of data, stories, written pieces and pictures have been uploaded online on so many different sites that noone could even hope to catalogue all of them in their lifetime.

The internet is obviously full of pictures, gifs and images. But what was the first picture ever uploaded online? It was actually stranger than you might think.

The first picture to ever appear on the web is a simple group photo of four women in fancy dresses all smiling for the camera. The pic was photoshopped with the first version of Photoshop on a color Mac: it has a light blue background and a pink sign that says: “Les horribles cernettes“.

Les horribles Cernettes were actually a musical group based in Geneva, at the CERN laboratory. The group was comprised of many CERN based scientists. The pic was uploaded as a .gif  by one of the inventors of the Internet, Tim Berner-Lee. Tim was actually a crossdresser and his story is rather interesting and you can find everything about it online.

Looking at the picture, that you can easily google, it seems clearly similar to all nowadays Facebook pictures. Time goes by, but our social media choices never change.