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> As far as images that a modern browser can display, JPEG was created in 1992 and GIF in 1987, so there isn't going to be much prior to that.

PBM is probably older than GIF and still has software support

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netpbm#File_formats

though apparently not directly in browsers! (I would have expected it did, but I couldn't get browsers to render PBM files directly.)

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Netscape Navigator supported PBM (at least in some versions you could even write directly into a frame/window via JS in order to compose an image on the fly).

Huh! So in that case, it could be that there's an old PBM file somewhere that could be a contender for this record.

I completely forgot about that! I very vaguely remember experimenting with it, and I think I never got it to work. I can't find anything on it now, though.

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