Angelfire Site May Be Mark Zuckerberg's First Website

A link to a very 90s-looking Angelfire website surfaced over at Hacker News, with the poster claiming that it belongs to Mark Zuckerberg, who would have created it when he was just 15-years-old. The website is full of all sorts of interesting things, ranging from a GPA calculator for "all you psychos, myself included, who obsess over grades," to a blinking yellow eyeball welcoming visitors to "the only site where a yellow eye blinks at you."

The webpage is both comical and a very interesting look into the mind of a teenage Mark Zuckerberg, who was at the time promoting his Vader Fader tool and introduced himself as Slim Shady: "Hi, my name is...Slim Shady. No, really, my name is Slim Shady. Just kidding, my name is Mark." On the Angelfire page, he invited comments via the AOL email address "Themarke51@aol.com".

The Angelfire site is full of Java applets, and contains several pages, including one dedicated to Vader Fader, a pong game, Magnetic Poetry, a base converter, something he calls the CyberMonkey, inviting users to test the "famous monkey problem" and email him asap if they "spot a soliloquy of Hamlet". While all of this, presented in a fairly clean manner above a solid gray background, is interesting, it is his page on "The Web" that catches the most attention.

Says young Zuckerberg on his page "The Web,": "As of now, the web is pretty small. Hopefully, it will grow into a larger web." And speaking of the applet, "If your name is already on The Web because someone else has chosen to be linked to you, then you may choose two additional people to be linked with." He has certainly come a long way since that small applet, and has connected far, far more people.

Of course, there's no guarantee this is Zuckerberg's Angelfire site, but all signs point to the affirmative.

[via Hacker News]