May 14, 1984 — Mark Zuckerberg Was Born

On May 14, 1984, Mark Zuckerberg was born — the person who first built a website for Harvard students to communicate, then turned it into one of the most influential platforms in the history of the internet.

What’s interesting is that Facebook did not look like something “huge” in the beginning. It was a fairly simple website with profiles, photos, and status updates. Social networks already existed in 2004: MySpace, Friendster, LiveJournal. But Facebook was the platform that quickly made the internet feel more “real.” People started using their real names, real photos, and real social connections online.

Zuckerberg wrote the first version of Facebook together with Dustin Moskovitz, Eduardo Saverin, Chris Hughes, and Andrew McCollum. The project’s first servers were literally sitting in a student dorm room.

In many ways, the story of Facebook is also the story of how the internet slowly transformed from a world of anonymous forums into a space where almost everyone had a digital identity. For many people in the 2000s and early 2010s, “the internet” practically became Facebook.

At the same time, Mark Zuckerberg himself long looked more like a typical programmer than the head of a giant corporation. Gray T-shirts, awkward presentations, a love of hacking culture, and the phrase “move fast and break things” became part of Silicon Valley mythology.

Today, Meta is no longer just Facebook. It also owns Instagram, WhatsApp, and invests enormous amounts of money into VR and AI. But it all started with a small student project that hardly anyone saw as future infrastructure for billions of people.