Talk:First image on the Web

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Articles for deletion This article was nominated for deletion on 6 July, 2006. The result of the discussion was keep.
It has been suggested that this article or section be merged into Les Horribles Cernettes. (Discuss)

Front page mention... I predict troll-instilled defacements of the first image :( Maybe protect the image for a while? BACbKA 22:35, 23 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Good idea, I just had to revert a defacement. Coolsi 23:09, 23 Dec 2004 (UTC)

Contents

[edit] Obligatory "hilarious" comment, got to get it out of the way.

I'd hit it. Sockatume, Talk 22:53, 23 Dec 2004 (UTC)

[edit] umm, no

that font technique, and spline cutout technique did not exist in 1992. I move that this article is crap.

[edit] I think it is possible

yeah, I also wonder about the file size... I mean, 279kb??? I guess it is possible, photoshop was around then, and there were high speed connections... and so did jpeg... but hmmm indeed. Jonbro 23:52, 19 Feb 2005 (UTC)

[edit] The capabilities to create the image did exist then.

As a graphics professional and geek of honor, I can confidently say that such an image could indeed have been created in 1992, even on amateur equipment. The text technique has been around more or less as long as graphics software itself, or even WYSIWIG word processors; the simple gradient background is nothing novel; and the so-declared "spline" cutout technique is anything but - by all appearences, the subjects were cut out in very much a Raster manner, further inferred to be partially through color-specific selection and partially through manual editing, by the rough edges which match the dither pattern created by the image's 256-color palette (which also serves the argument of its legitimacy, since high-color displays and video hardware were hardly available to average people at the time).

Although, had I created such an image in 1992 on such equipment as was likely used, I'd certainly have something worthy of pride (and publication on the Web!) :D

The image is from Photoshop 3.08 which means it is from 1995 or later. It may be the original picture but not the original file.

[edit] Hmmm

And of course the first image on the web is a picture of women.

[edit] Proof?

This seems like a ridiculous claim; it definitely needs far more supporting evidence than one guy who claims it's true. Should we go ahead and propose this for deletion, on the grounds that it is little more than speculation? ~ Booyabazooka 23:19, 15 May 2006 (UTC)

Why does it seem like a ridiculous claim? The band was formed at CERN in 1992, and the Web was created by TBL at CERN in 1991-1992... what were you expecting? And what has that to do with Wikipedia not being a crystal ball? KWH 12:17, 16 May 2006 (UTC)
I linked to the crystal ball section, pointedly for the quote "Wikipedia is not a collection of unverifiable speculation." The problem is that there is no way to verify that no one else had sent an image some time before then. This article doesn't seem to contain anything but speculation. ~ Booyabazooka 16:11, 16 May 2006 (UTC)
There is a very easy way to verify this claim, Booyabazooka! You have all the informations that you need: the name of the person doing this claim, and the institution where he works (you can send him an e-mail: just add @ and cern.ch after his name.surname). He is not me, by the way:) ~ Dr.psycho 22:41, 16 May 2006 (UTC)
Do you also have the names of every other person who may have been able to do this before him, to ask them all if they haven't? ~ Booyabazooka 00:59, 17 May 2006 (UTC)
B - note that the claim is "First image on the Web", not first image transmitted on the Internet. If you read up on the History of the World Wide Web almost no graphical browsers (other than for the NeXT) existed prior to April-May 1992. According to a Wired News article from 1999:
"When Tim Berners-Lee was writing the software to serve GIF files, he asked co-worker Silvano de Gennaro for a few pictures of the singers. One of the band photos was among the first five pictures published on the Web."[1]
Was it the first? Maybe, maybe not, but no one else is claiming the "honor". KWH 05:30, 17 May 2006 (UTC)
Normally it would be a good point, Booyabazooka, but as pointed out by KWH there is no other candidate around. In order to solve the problem, we should ask Tim Berners-Lee (but I don't know his current e-mail address). Anyway, the reason why I don't see any problem with this claim is that Tim Berners-Lee at the time worked at CERN, this guy too, and the WWW was very little known outside of the particle physics community (and even in that community, it was not so hype outside CERN). For fairness I will not remove the "disputed" label from this page, by I don't consider it seriously disputed:) ~ Dr.psycho 01:01, 21 May 2006 (UTC)

[edit] who dares?

TBL's email address can be found here — with instructions how to write him properly :) http://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/#Before —Preceding unsigned comment added by Meisterlampe (talk • contribs) 08:29, 3 June 2006

I dared, hoping that I was actually the first to do so. I'll report back once I get a reply. Whooo...I just mailed Tim Berners-Lee. I feel all giddy inside :P -- Ferkelparade π 20:42, 7 June 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Original Research

Don't forget Wikipedia's policy on Original Research. --TrustTruth 20:45, 7 June 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Counter Proof?

In TBL's "Weaving the Web" he states that very soon after the web was created, he linked newsgroups and BBS communities to the web. I would have thought that these would have contained multiple image files uploaded in various formats (although I don't know for sure, can anyone verify?). If we can define these as 'the web' then i think i may have disproved this rather appealing tale. I'll re-read the relevant sections of the book tonight and get some quotes up. --JeffUK 21:52, 9 July 2006 (UTC)


Here we are: "I programmed the browser so it could follow links not only to files on HTTP servers, but also to Internet news articles and newsgroups. These were not transmitted on the Web's HTTP protocol, but in an Interned protocol called FTP (File transfer protocol). With this move internet newsgroups and articles were available as hypertext pages. In one fell swoop, a huge amount of the information that was already on the internet was available on the Web." Berners-Lee, ("Weaving the web", 1999, Texere, London, P33) --JeffUK 22:49, 9 July 2006 (UTC)

For what it's worth, I'm surprised at that quote because it doesn't seem to make sense - Usenet groups were served via NNTP, not FTP. Images and other files in Usenet groups would be uuencoded and often split among many messages. FTP sites existed and probably had images, but so did Gopher sites - and one had to download, save, and then open the image in an image viewer.
"First image on the Web" is taken - by me at least - to mean first image transmitted via the HTTP protocol. Per the above Wired reference, TBL used the image (and about 4 others) to test his HTTP image-serving code shortly after he finished writing it. de Gennaro's claim - "the first picture ever to be clicked on in a web browser" - seems like simple ellipsis to me. Other than that it's really just a neat little tidbit because someone might ask the question and it's the best answer that can be given. KWH 15:20, 10 July 2006 (UTC)
Usenet messages were (and are) stored in spool directories which can be made accessible by ftp. In the early 1990s, nearly all internet access was expensive and tightly controlled, so it made more sense for a site with a few workstations to download a Usenet "feed" of a few groups to a few hundred groups, according to the available bandwidth of the internet connection, and for local workstations to access the spool either directly (over ftp, or nfs) or indirectly via nntp. You're right to state that Usenet carried, at that date, only uuencoded pictures. --Tony Sidaway 18:05, 18 July 2006 (UTC)