La prima foto che ha fatto la storia del web

È impossibile stabilire con certezza quale sia stata la prima foto pubblicata su internet, ma possiamo raccontare con certezza la storia della prima foto che ha cambiato internet.

C'entrano il CERN, Tim Berners-Lee, Silvano de Gennaro, una Canon EOS 650, la seconda versione di Photoshop e una band pronta a esibirsi all'Hadronic Music Festival.

Les Horribles Cernettes, a particle physics parody pop band led by Michele de Gennaro, a 3D graphics artist at CERN. The photo part was taken backstage at the 1992 Hadronic Music Festival by Silvano de Gennaro, Michele's then-boyfriend and an IT developer at CERN, with a Canon EOS 650. He later tricked out the image with those pink Cernettes graphics on the very first version of Photoshop. The comedic, nerd-girl, doo-wop band was a bit of an inside joke at the time. So de Gennaro never expected his janky album cover to change the world.

[...] De Gennaro took that Cernettes photo on July 18, 1992. That was around the same time that Berners-Lee was developing software that would enable the web to handle GIF images. Apparently, Berners-Lee was just bumming around the office, working on his web project, when he asked Silvio de Gennaro, who sat nearby, for a few scanned photos that he could upload.

You might expect that the first photo on the web would've something historical, maybe a picture taken by a famous photographer. But instead, de Gennaro handed off that album cover he'd done for the Cernettes. Tim Berners-Lee was a fan of the band, so when it came time to upload the first photo to the web, the Cernettes got the honor of being the first photo on the web.