On CERN’s Internet??!
Date: February 10, 2025
One of my favorite “party tricks” is asking people who created the internet. You’d think that, considering we all live on this thing, most people would have at least a general idea. But no. The responses range from wild guesses like “Bill Gates?” (wrong) to blank stares, as if I just asked them to recite the digits of pi past 3.14.
So, let’s set the record straight: the internet as we know it was born at CERN. Yes, the same CERN with the giant particle accelerator, the one that conspiracy theorists think is opening portals to other dimensions and creating mandela effects. In 1989, Tim Berners-Lee, a British scientist at CERN, invented the World Wide Web—the system of hyperlinks and browsers that lets us do literally everything online today. Before that, the internet was just a clunky network used by universities and the military. Berners-Lee basically gave it a user-friendly interface and the ability to share information globally.
And what did CERN do with this world-changing technology? Did they gatekeep it, slap a subscription fee on it, or try to monetize it like a Silicon Valley startup? Nope. They put the entire thing in the public domain for free in 1993, making it open to everyone. No CERN? No websites. No blogs. No social media. Imagine if we had to pay a subscription fee just to log online in addition to the damn wifi bill...
But here’s a fun bit of internet history most people don’t know—do you know what the first image ever uploaded to the internet was? No, it wasn’t something profound like a research paper or a historical document. It was a picture of parody girl group called the CERNettes, made up of CERN employees' wives and girlfriends who performed satirical songs about physics.
This was in 1992, when Berners-Lee’s colleague, Silvano de Gennaro, uploaded a grainy, Photoshopped image of the group as a test. The CERNettes wore ‘60s-style outfits, and the image itself is like a fever dream. Little did they know, they were making internet history—becoming the first digital photo to ever hit the World Wide Web.
So the next time you’re scrolling endlessly, posting, or just lurking in the weird corners of the internet, give a little nod to CERN. Because without them, you’d be doing none of this. And without the CERNettes, the first thing on the internet might have been something boring like a scanned memo. Instead we got the wives of the biggest nerds in the world absolutely slaying.
