Facebook turned 12 today. It’s been part of everyday life for long enough that an infinite number of articles have been published about its phenomenal success and the vision of its inventor and CEO, Mark Zuckerberg. (I wrote about him myself recently .)

But somebody out there had to write the very first profile of Mark Zuckerberg. And as far as I know, that person was Michael Grynbaum, a reporter for the Harvard Crimson. His article “Mark E. Zuckerberg ’06: The Whiz Behind the FaceBook.com” appeared on June 10, 2004, when his fellow Harvard student’s social network was slightly over four months old.

The Crimson had already covered TheFacebook.com’s meteoric rise—a mind-bending 650 user signups in just a few days—and, before that, the trouble Zuckerberg had gotten himself into with his hot-or-not site Facemash. It had even written about Synapse, the playlist-creating software that Zuckerberg and his pal Adam D’Angelo had created in high school. But Grynbaum’s 1,800-word article was the first thing it published that felt like a Zuckerberg profile rather than a news story.

Almost a dozen years later, it remains among one of the most interesting articles about Facebook ever written. It offers an opportunity to meet the service’s founder at a point when it was already clear that he had come up with something that might be important and valuable, but before it was entirely clear what the implications were. And while today’s Zuckerberg–despite the gray T-shirt and eternally boyish demeanor–often comes off like he sees himself as a statesman of sorts, Grynbaum got him in unhomogenized form.

Grynbaum interviewed Zuckerberg in his dorm room in Harvard’s Kirkland House, as TheFacebook.com’s creator was boxing up his possessions at the end of the semester. “Even at that point, it was clear Facebook was a phenomenon,” the former student reporter and current city hall bureau chief for the New York Times told me. “It was ubiquitous on campus within about 72 hours of launching. I can’t say we knew just how huge it would become, but there was a lot of interest in Mark.”

Okay, enough talk about this article. Let’s just quote a few choice chunks–though the whole thing is very much worth your time.

Today, we may measure Facebook history in years, but at Harvard in 2004, they measured it in semesters–and it hadn’t quite completed its first one: