Crossdressing, Compression and Colliders: The First Photo on the Web
Posted by Abraham_Riesman for Vice.com
on Tuesday, Jul 10, 2012

http://motherboard.vice.com/2012/7/10/crossdressing-compression-and-a-collider-the-first-photo-on-the-web

The first photographic image ever uploaded to the Web ...featured attractive women in a come-hither pose.... Next Wednesday, July 18th, the photograph ...will turn 20 years old. Despite the artifact's world-historical significance, its full story has never been told.

But why did the Cernettes become part of photographic history and not, say, a particle accelerator? Partly because Tim Berners-Lee was into crossdressing.

"I don't know whether I should be telling you this, but he worked at CERN and I saw him because he was part of our pantomime in our amateur operatic society," remembered Colette Marx-Nielsen, a Cernettes member (she's second from the right in the photo). "He was the dame dressed as a woman."

So when Berners-Lee and his team cooked up a new edition of their still-primitive World Wide Web system, one that could support photo files, he went a few steps from his workstation to ask de Gennaro for a Cernettes-related image.

A microscopic percentage of the world saw the online version of the photo. ...But in an almost imperceptible way, the world changed.