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Mark Zuckerberg’s first site proves even geniuses made embarassing Angelfire pages at one point

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Mark Zuckerberg is busy promoting the new Facebook Home for mobile, so it makes sense he hasn’t taken the time to clean up older projects … even really, really old projects. He had years to get rid of the evidence that he once made an Angelfire webpage that touted the merits of quesadillas, so maybe he wanted us to find it.

Some heroes with a lot of free time over at Hacker News unearthed a decades-old Angelfire site associated with the same username on Mark Zuckerberg’s father’s AOL account. More incriminating, the author of the site is someone named “Mark” around the same age as Zuckerberg who grew up in the same area. Even more incriminating: The site’s source code lists someone named “Mark Zuckerberg” as the creator.

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Once you look for it, you see traces of the be-hoodied genius everywhere.

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Our personal favorite is the magnetic poetry section on the page. He also has a comfortingly normal teenage boy’s “About Me,” where he says that his name is Slim Shady and discusses hopes that his website remodel will draw the attention of search engines. So on one hand he loved Eminem, which in 1999 was as natural as owning clogs or fearing Y2k. On the other hand, he was predicting the importance of SEO at 15.

The website features a game called Cow-a-bungee, which you might think is a fun Flash game involving bungee jumping cows but in fact is not a fun Flash game and instead involves math (if you’re also a right-brained type, you will want to skip it):

Screen Shot 2013-04-04 at 6.41.28 PMThe rest of Zuckerberg’s page is a mix of teen-type content with the work of an obviously-gifted-young-tech-savant. He even had a  “GPA” section, where he made a feature that lets you plug in all of your grades for all of your classes and it calculates your GPA. Why would he do this? According to the website, “This one goes out to all you psychos, myself included, who obsess over grades.” You win this round, Zuck. Actually, you win all rounds.

Another highlight is his choice of “Suck it!” as the best saying for the year. Correct.

There’s a large excerpt of the list below. Mark Zuckerberg is busy finding ways to conquer new parts of the digital world, so he hasn’t confirmed whether it’s his page or not. But c’mon. It probably is. Don’t kill this dream.

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Kate Knibbs
Former Contributor
Kate Knibbs is a writer from Chicago. She is very happy that her borderline-unhealthy Internet habits are rewarded with a…
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