Have you ever wondered what the first item sold on eBay was? Or who ran the first banner ad on the internet? Or what the first spam massage tried to sell? 11Points has those firsts and more, including this picture, which was the first image on the internet in 1992. It was uploaded by programmer Silvano de Gennaro in Geneva at the request of World Wide Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee.
Link -via Unique Daily
Berners-Lee asked Gennaro to scan some photos from a CERN party and post them on that page. Gennaro didn't really get what he was talking about but scanned in the photos, FTPed them to the server and linked them to a page. The picture of the four women, complete with their early '90s "Don't Tell Mom The Babysitter's Dead" fashion sense, was the first one ever viewed in a web browser.
Link -via Unique Daily
First image on the World Wide Web perhaps, I didn't get onto that until a few years later.
I downloaded images from the internet by late 91. It was not a point and click process, I remember at one point joining usenet binaries manually, piping stuff around in a shell before downloading the file to my mac and turning it into a binary file with BinHex.
People tend nowadays to think the internet and the web are the same, forgetting things like newsgroups, IRC, ftp servers with archie, telnet bbs's, MUDs and MUSHes, etc.
http://www.neatorama.com/2005/08/09/cool-optical-illusions/
Not that anyone cares.