Mark Zuckerberg's Angelfire Site (Circa 1999) | Hacker News Reader

Mark Zuckerberg's Angelfire Site (Circa 1999)

web.archive.org

Maybe I'm extrapolating from nothing here, but it's interesting to see that some of the ideas that shaped his career have been with him for a while.

Most notable is his "The Web" applet, which is a sort of extremely elementary prototype of Facebook:

http://web.archive.org/web/20021201160011/http://www.angelfi...

Similarly, his remark on his drawing tool page:

"The Internet has some effect on almost every person in the world. However, it is fairly uncommon for a person to have an effect on the Internet without going through the long and tedious process of creating a website"

It seems like from very early on, Mark was interested about how to a) make the web a place for anyone to express themselves, and b) that would allow people to perpetuate their real life relationships.

Again, I may be just reading too much into things here, but I feel that those are interesting thoughts.

I wonder what links people would make between my teenage programming projects and my current work... :)

> Most notable is his "The Web" applet, which is a sort of extremely elementary prototype of Facebook

Right on point.

Wow.. "The Web" project seems especially prophetic:

http://web.archive.org/web/20021201160011/http://www.angelfi...

"As of now, the web is pretty small. Hopefully, it will grow into a larger web. This is one of the few applets that require your participation to work well. 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. Otherwise, if you see someone who you know and would like to be linked with but your name is not already on The Web, then you can contact me and I will link that person to you and put you on The Web. If you do not know anyone on The Web, contact me anyway and I will put you on it. In order for this applet to work, you must E-Mail me your name and the names of the two people that you would like to be linked with. Thank you!"

Another overnight success story.

No need for archive.org, his site is still up:

http://www.angelfire.com/ny/mez51/

Interestingly, he seems to have gone and re-implemented parseInt and .toString() in JavaScript for his base converter, instead of using the built-in functions: http://www.angelfire.com/ny/mez51/conv.html

I realized that after I posted the link, then I noticed another link was on the front page, so more or less redundant, but I predict the archive copy will outlive Angelfire.

google the symbol names and you will see the javascript is copypasta.

So, he went from Angelfire sites that had big java eyeballs follow your cursor...

to a website where the worlds' governments big eyeballs follow your cursor..

great

I'm quite happy that I turned Java off before visiting that site. Then again, it's always off unless I need it.

No need for archive.org, it's still up and running: http://www.angelfire.com/ny/mez51/

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