I
find the most interesting person in computing history to be Mark Zuckerberg. His father taught him Atari BASIC Programming
in the 1990's and hired software developer David Newman to tutor him
privately. Newman found it difficult to
stay ahead of young Zuckerberg most of the time and called him a prodigy. We know Mark Zuckerberg as one of the five
founders of Facebook and I think his social network would not have been created
if he took the job Microsoft offered instead of attending Harvard
University. I think the world would be
an entirely different place without Facebook.
There is not one person who does not a have a Facebook, and if you actually
do find a person without an account we find him or her to be out of place. Someone we wouldn't want to be in the social
loop with anyway. The accomplishment I
find most interesting about him is the fact that he built Facebook and hosted
it from his dorm room at the age of 21 and later made him a billionaire by the age
of 23. He was named number 1 on the 2010
list of the Top 100 "most influential people of the Information Age"
by Vanity Fair.
Another
one of Zuckerberg's accomplishment is a media player we built called Synapse,
it used artificial intelligence to determine the user's listening habits. Microsoft and AOL tried to purchase Synapse
and recruit him, but Zuckerberg decided to attend Harvard instead. If I ever got the chance to meet Mark
Zuckerberg I would ask him why he decided
to attend Harvard instead of taking the job at Microsoft? Another question I would like to ask him is why
did he decide to launch Facesmash?
Facesmash was a web site he created in 2003 that let students select the
best looking person from a choice of two photos. Students would select the "hotter"
of the two. Harvard executives forced
Zuckerberg to take down the site after it being open for only a few days. Maybe he built the site for the thrill of
hacking into the Face Books at the Harvard housing buildings, or maybe for a
personal vendetta. We really don't know. Another question I would like to ask him is "Without
your father's influence and kick start in computer programming, do you think
you would have had an interest in computer programming? Did you excel because you wanted to make your
father proud or because you wanted to make yourself proud?" Fathers sometimes have a weird way of showing
sons that they love them, so I always wondered if Mark Zuckerberg went on to do
great things in computer programming to satisfy his father or to satisfy
himself. No matter the reason why he pushed himself to excel, there is no doubt that Mark
Zuckerberg has made the world smaller by creating a social network that is easy
to use and update to bring information, people, and friends together.
Interesting Choice!
ReplyDeleteThis was an interesting article. Do you think it was just Facebook that really changed our culture, or would something else have come along that would do the same thing?
I think the common population has always wanted to use the Internet to bring people closer together and communicate. First it was chat rooms, discussion forums, and shoutboxes - Facebook just put all those concepts together and made it even easier to share information among friends. I guess you can say that the Internet has evolved since then and if not for Facebook, something else would have come along and accomplished the same thing.
ReplyDelete