Nowadays with a complete virtual overload of JPEG's ranging from people making duck faces to mirror shots online, it's hard to imagine there once was only one photo uploaded on the web at one point. But there was.
The very first picture ever posted to the Internet was 20 years ago this coming Wednesday, showing four women all glammed up for an advertisement. According to Motherboard, who tracked the digital photo back to its exact origin, the first online picture was posted on July 18, 1992.
The picture - now a relic - was posted by a Geneva-based comedy band called Les Horribles Cernettes of the CERN laboratory, also known as the group responsible for discovering the Higgs Boson, as a promotional album cover.
It was taken by Silvano de Gennaro, then an IT developer at CERN who hadn't a clue what the web even was, using a Canon EOS 650. He was waiting backstage at the Hardronic Music Festival for the Les Horribles Cernettes and snapped the photos of the four women as a possible album cover for the band. Little did he know that very image would become iconic.
When history happens, you don't know that you're in it, de Gennaro told Motherboard.
de Gennaro gave the photo to Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web who was crafting a new system with the ability to include photos.
With nearly 50 different known sites for sharing pictures on the Internet today, the rest is 20 years of photo history.