Technically speaking, there wasn’t one. Despite what the internet says.
This picture has been widely reported as the first photo uploaded to the World Wide Web.
Sir Tim Berners-Lee invented the web at particle physics lab CERN, Geneva, in 1989. This picture was put up a few years later.
The women in the photo were Les Horribles Cernettes, an all-female "high energy rock band".
They formed in the same time and place as the web. At the time of the photo, the band comprised Michele Muller, Colette Marx-Nielsen, Angela Higney, and Lynn Veronneau. In the years since, lots of new members have drifted in and out of the band.
Michele Muller (now Michele de Gennaro) was working at CERN as a graphic designer when the Cernettes started up, and was the only founding member still in their most recent incarnation.
The Cernettes
Silvano de Gennaro, a software engineer at CERN at the time, who both managed the band, wrote their songs, and was dating band-member Muller, told BuzzFeed in an email: "The web was born with pictures already inside it."
At this point, the internet had already existed for a couple of decades and contained "millions of pictures", says de Gennaro, so it doesn't make sense to talk of a "first" anything on the web. "This is why there isn't a single 'first picture', like there isn't a 'first line' or a 'first page'."
"At the time you didn't 'upload' a picture, you just copied it to a folder on the server and created a link to it by typing an HTML line," he says. "It was like programming, and we were all programmers."
The Cernettes
