Hacker News Reader

From my understanding, most schools used to have hard copy facebooks. I've read Harvard definitely had a (per house) online facebook back when Zuckerberg was a freshman (and, interestingly, still did as of at least ~2008).

Yep. I still have my freshman facebook from CMU in 1992.

Little known fact about Zuckerberg and Facebook; the idea and the name came from his high school, Phillips Exeter Academy ... I would know since I was in the same dorm as Zuckerberg around that time (it was a boarding school).

Exeter was certainly neither the first nor the only place to have a paper facebook. Harvard, MIT, and most summer camps all had the same thing at that time and years prior.

"The Facebook" is a common thing in many organizations. Even companies had them before the popular website existed.

At the University of Chicago it was called the "pic book" instead.

Apparently I was ill informed. My bad.