14
stay ahead of him.”
12
Newman eventually lost track of his pupil in later
years and was stunned to find out in 2010 that Zuckerberg had created
Facebook.
After working a short time with Newman, Zuckerberg enrolled in
a Thursday-night graduate computer course at nearby Mercy College.
When Dr. Zuckerberg dropped preteen Mark off for the first class, the in-
structor pointed to the short, skinny kid and told Edward, “You can’t bring
him into the classroom with you.”
13
Edward told the instructor that it was
not he but his son who was the student.
Pinging on ZuckNet
The computers in the Zuckerberg household increased in number as Ed-
ward became one of the first dentists to use the machines for digital
radiography. Instead of using traditional photographic film to take dental
X-rays, digital radiography employs digital sensors, which create X-ray
imagery. Edward also had business computers for his dentist office, and
Mark and his sisters each had their own machines.
When Mark was twelve, he used the computers to solve a problem
in the large Zuckerberg home. There was no intercom, so the family and
dental staff communicated by shouting. For example, when a dental
patient showed up at the front door, their arrival was announced by
someone upstairs yelling to the receptionist down in the basement. To
improve household communications, Mark created a messaging soft-
ware program he called ZuckNet, which linked all the computers in the
house.
ZuckNet sent messages by a method called pinging. Ping was a
basic Internet program that allowed a user to verify that an individual
Internet address existed and could accept messages. It made a pinging
sound when a message was received. Dr. Zuckerberg’s computer an-
nounced when a patient arrived, and the children communicated with
each other from their bedroom computers. ZuckNet was a primitive
version of America Online (AOL) Instant Messenger, which came out the
following year.
As his interest in coding grew, Zuckerberg began reading compli-
cated books about programming. The first was
C++ for Dummies
, which
