Pre-Facebook: Mark Zuckerberg’s Possible Teenage Website Emerges
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Justine Hunt/The Boston Globe via Getty Images(NEW YORK) — Take this as a reminder that the Internet never forgets anything: The address for what looks to be a 1990s Angelfire website of Mark Zuckerberg’s has resurfaced.
Lucky for the Facebook co-founder and CEO, there doesn’t seem to be anything terribly embarrassing on the site … just perhaps a tiny bit embarrassing.
The team at Gizmodo did a little research and was able to link this Java-happy relic of a website to the AOL username “ekzooks.” A simple Google search yielded results showing that screen name used by an Edward Zuckerberg, Mark’s father’s name, on several sites.
Indeed, the author of the site refers to himself as high school freshman Mark (and Slim Shady – one of the slightly embarrassing bits on the website) on the “About Me” page.
But other than the dated Eminem reference, there’s not very much more to scoff at on the purported teen Zuckerberg site. Although the Pong game and magnetic poetry board “java applets” seem elementary to modern-day Web surfers, they’re fairly impressive for a 9th grader in the pre-21st century programming era.
Of course, we now know that Zuckerberg has been programming since middle school, so it’s no surprise that his possible precocious attempts at programming might not seem all that precocious. The site author even wrote at the time on the “about me” page that he’d recently redone the site “in an attempt that perhaps some search engine will recognize it.”
There are plenty of other quirky pages on the site, like a GPA calculator, an immature social networking web (go figure) and something called the Vader Fader that, regrettably, can’t seem to be used without an old version of AOL.
Facebook didn’t immediately respond to emails when ABC News reached out for comment.
Jump over to check out the pages for yourself.
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