Excerpt from: http://astrumpeople.com/mark-zuckerberg-biography-success-story-of-facebook-founder-and-ceo/

Mark Zuckerberg Biography: Success Story of Facebook Founder and CEO

In this success story, we are going to share Mark Zuckerberg biography, the youngest billionaire on the planet who created the Facebook social network that now has 1 billion monthly active users.

Mark Zuckerberg Childhood Biography

Mark Elliot Zuckerberg was born on May 14, 1984, and grew up in the suburbs of New York, Dobbs Ferry. He was the second of four children and the only son in the educated family. Mark’s father, Edward Zuckerberg, is a dentist and mother, Karen Zuckerberg, is a psychiatrist. His father owned a dental practice next to the family house. Mark and his three sisters, Arielle, Randi and Donna were raised in Dobbs Ferry, New York.

Mark Zuckerberg Childhood

Mark got interested in programming yet in elementary school. The fact that the world is divided between programmers and users, Mark found out when he was 10 years old and got his first PC Quantex 486DX on the Intel 486.

From Mark Zuckerberg biography we found out he was taught Atari BASIC Programming by his father and when Mark was about 12, he used Atari BASIC to create a messenger, which he called “ZuckNet”. It made all the computers connected to each other and allowed to transfer messages between the house and dental office. His father installed the messenger on his computer in his dentist office and the receptionist could inform him when a new patient arrived. Mark also enjoyed developing games and communication tools and as he said he was doing it just for fun. His father, Edward Zuckerberg, even hired a computer tutor David Newman, who gave his son some private lessons.

Also being at high school, Mark wrote an artificially intelligent media player Synapse for MP3-playlists that carefully studied the preferences of a user and was able to generate playlists ‘guessing’, which tracks a user wanted to listen to. Microsoft and AOL got an unusual interest in Synapse media player and wanted to acquire it. However, the young talent rejected the offer of the IT-giants and then politely rejected their invitation to cooperate. Just like that, Mark Zuckerberg refused from dozens, maybe even hundreds of thousands of dollars, and work at one of the top IT-corporations.

Soon Mark Zuckerberg studied at the Academy of Phillips Exeter, an exclusive preparatory school in New Hampshire. He showed good results there in science and literature, receiving a degree in classics. He also showed a great talent in fencing and even became the school captain of the fencing team. Yet Mark Zuckerberg stayed fascinated by coding and wanted to work on the development of new software.

In 2002, after graduating Phillips Exeter, Zuckerberg entered Harvard University. By his second year at the Ivy League, he had gained a reputation as a software developer on campus. It was then when he wrote a program CourseMatch, which helped students choose their subjects on the basis of lists of courses from other users.

Mark Zuckerberg graduates Phillips Exeter Academy in 2002.