How Did Our Digital Images Get from the Old Days to Here?

Today for every printed image handing on the wall or living in a box or album there are billions more on the web. How did we get from the old days to here? Here's a brief quiz.

1. Name the two most popular protocols for viewing images over the internet in the early days.
   
2. In what year was the very first photo uploaded to the web?
   
3. Who uploaded that first photo?
   
4. What was the content of the first photo?
   
5. What was the first graphical web browser that allow you to view both text and images in the same window? Where was it developed?
   
6. How many images are available on the the web today?
   

1. Any two of FTP (File Transfer Protocol), Gopher, and NNTP (Network News Transfer Protocol) will work. If the question made you recall the Lynx browser, take extra points.
   
2. July 18, 1992
   
3. Tim Berners Lee. He just grabbed a scan from a colleague so it was also the first "just testing" image upload.
   
4. It was a picture of female CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research) staffers who had formed a parody doo-wop group. For years their fun site was on CERN servers but now is found at https://cernettes.wixs​ite.com/cernettes.
   
5. NCSA Mosaic. Mosaic was developed at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois.
   
6. The number is not known. Think high hundreds or even thousands of billions.
   

Interesting post, but I flunked your test.

I remember in the early days of the internet (for the general public) one could send a photo to another person.
To me, that was so fantastic, sending photos over this new thing called the internet. I was impressed.

I also remember being able to view catalogs on my pc. No longer sending away for a catalog via the mail. Nice!

Anyone remember the war between Internet Explorer and Netscape Navigator?

Perfectly Frank wrote in post #18848743
Anyone remember the war between Internet Explorer and Netscape Navigator?

Oh yes.

I have been severely out-geeked!

4, Les Horribles Cernettes

Perfectly Frank wrote in post #18848743
. . . Anyone remember the war between Internet Explorer and Netscape Navigator?

AKA the War Between Forces of Good and The Evil Empire.

Jeff_56 wrote in post #18848935
4, Les Horribles Cernettes

Yes. Their first and most famous hit is on YouTube complete with views of some collider and accelerator interior backgrounds and vintage animation at the end. Collider was first sung as a combined gag and lament of a CERN secretary tired of waiting day and night for her permanently-on-shift physicist boyfriend. Today it could be a guy never seeing his physicist girlfriend but those were different days. https://youtu.be/1e1eL​e1ihT0

"We had 20 minutes to shoot the first scene in the LEP tunnel. LEP (Large Electron Positron) was the predecessor of the LHC, and the largest accelerator at CERN. We had to install lights, video, sound system etc., plus shoot the clip in 20 min. before they restarted the positron beam and disintegrated us! Risky business being a singer at CERN."

You say you love me but you never beep me
You always promise but you never date me
I try to fax but it's busy, always
I try the network but you crash the gateways
You never spend your nights with me
You don't go out with other girls either
You only love your collider

I fill you screen with hearts and roses
I fill your mail file with lovely phrases
They all come back: "invalid user"
You never let me into your computer
You never spend your nights with me
You don't go out with other girls either
You prefer your collider

I gave you golden ring to show you my love
You went to stick it in a printed circuit
To fix a voltage leak in your collector
You plug my feelings into your detector
You never spend your nights with me
You don't go out with other girls either
You only love your collider
Your collider.
Your collider.

I could not answer any of the questions.

I do remember installing my first VGA card, in an IBM XT and the first file I opened was a 320x200 pixel BMP 256 colour image of a tree frog.
It probably took over a minute, drawing line by line to display the complete image.
Then I and a few friends looked at it in amazement. It was a massive leap from the CGA emulator I had been used to.

That would have been about the time I saw my first high resolution images on a Mac. I was amazed things had progressed so much from the original Mac graphics I had worked with in the mid-80's in a desktop publishing gig. I interviewed for a job with a company doing full color graphics with Macintosh stuff that made other computers of the day look like a hammer and chisel it seemed to me. It was the beginning of the whole digital image world IMO. Everything before it had been clipart. I thought we were on top of things with our scanner attachment for our ImageWriter Mac printer. But just a very few years later we left the dot matrix world for full color scans. I was truly shocked how far things had come so quickly.

It was 1991. My workplace had a 286-16Mhz PC that was pretty flash but 386 PCs were available. 1992 I started a new job and Mac Quadras were standard issue.
I think it was 1996 I got a 486 DX4-100 which was a massive leap from my '91 PC.

I got 1 right, but I believe most of the questions are incorrect.
#1. FTP is not capable of viewing images as it does not have any image viewing software included. All it can do is transfer files. Once transferred, you need something to view the image.
#2,3,4. What do you consider the web? What about Arpanet? Compuserve? There were millions of images already being transferred well before July 18, 1992.
#5. Well, Keycom had a browser (KeyFax) a decade before Mosaic. It could even transfer images albeit, slowly.
#6. Gave myself credit for this one. Too big to count.

I knew images were all over stuff like AOL before 1992. But that wasn't the internet so I didn't mention it.

Jeff_56 wrote in post #18849737
I knew images were all over stuff like AOL before 1992. But that wasn't the internet so I didn't mention it.

Of course it was. AOL, Compuserve, Prodigy, Usenet, and many others were clearly ISPs based on the internet concept.

gjl711 wrote in post #18849688
I got 1 right, but I believe most of the questions are incorrect.
#1. FTP is not capable of viewing images as it does not have any image viewing software included. All it can do is transfer files. Once transferred, you need something to view the image.
#2,3,4. What do you consider the web? What about Arpanet? Compuserve? There were millions of images already being transferred well before July 18, 1992.
#5. Well, Keycom had a browser (KeyFax) a decade before Mosaic. It could even transfer images albeit, slowly.
#6. Gave myself credit for this one. Too big to count.

Thanks for joining the trip down the lane. Revised score of 5.

#1 Yep. Poorly worded. Transfer indeed. +1 for you. -1 for puzzle constructor
#2-4 Web is shorthand for world wide web. Since knowing there was an working internet before http led you astray take +3
#5 If I remember correctly KeyFax did not itself display images but just retrieved them, I think using Gopher. And it predated the web. -0

Jeff_56 wrote in post #18849737
I knew images were all over stuff like AOL before 1992. But that wasn't the internet so I didn't mention it.

Think you meant to say "wasn't the web" rather than "wasn't the internet."