Although this photo may look like a prom picture on Facebook that’s been blingee’d, it’s actually the very first photo that was ever uploaded to the web. The history of the picture — in all its random glory and woeful photoshopping — is amazing.
Motherboard actually tracked the photo’s origin down and found out that the lovely ladies in the photo were part of a musical group called Les Horrible Cernettes, a comedy band based at the CERN laboratory in Geneva, which was comprised of admin assistants and significant others of CERN scientists. The photo was tweaked in version one of Photoshop on a colour Mac and saved as a GIF before being uploaded by Tim Berners-Lee, one of the inventors of the internet… and a crossdresser. Yeah, it gets a little weird. Be sure to read the whole story at Motherboard of how a random picture taken 20 years ago became the internet’s first picture.
The full photo before Photoshop.
Looking at this unedited, it’s almost fitting that this was the first picture uploaded to the web — every other picture on Facebook looks just like it. [Motherboard]