Two decades before scientists at CERN announced they had likely found the Higgs boson, the Geneva-based particle physics lab made history with a little less fanfare.
That's when a promotional photo of Les Horribles Cernettes, a comedic musical group composed of girlfriends and secretaries of CERN scientists, became the first photo ever to appear on the Internet. It was posted 20 years ago this week. While only a handful of people saw it then, the photo is now having something of a revival.
Silvano de Gennaro, an I.T. developer at CERN who was also manager of the Cernettes, snapped the photo while backstage at a music festival organized by the lab's administrators. He edited it using the first version of Adobe Photoshop, and saved it as a GIF file on his Macintosh.
After Internet pioneer Tim Berners-Lee, also working at CERN at the time, developed a new version of the World Wide Web that supported photos, he uploaded the Cernettes photo to what might be called the first ever band website — a page on the CERN website devoted to its musical acts.
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