---
title: "Which came first, Amazon or email?"
description: "Amazon vs email: email came first, by 23 years — 1971 against 1994. What happened in each case, and why the dates are often given differently."
url: https://atoneplace.net/which-came-first/amazon-vs-email/
site: "At One Place"
---

# Which came first, Amazon or email?

**Which came first, Amazon or email?: email**

1971 — 23 years before Amazon

email came first, by 23 years. Ray Tomlinson sent the first message between two computers and chose the @ sign.

## Side by side

|  | Amazon | email |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Year | 1994 | 1971 |
| Date | 1994-07-05 | — |
| Category | technology | technology |
| What happened | Jeff Bezos incorporated the company in Washington state. | Ray Tomlinson sent the first message between two computers and chose the @ sign. |

## Amazon

Amazon was incorporated on 5 July 1994, originally as Cadabra, and the website opened in July 1995 selling only books. The 1994 incorporation date is used here because it is the company's own founding date; if you mean the shop, 1995 is the answer. Either way it predates Google by three or four years and eBay by about a year.

## email

Messages had been left for other users of the same machine since the mid-1960s. What Tomlinson did in 1971 was send one between two different computers on ARPANET, and pick @ to separate the user from the host because it was the only preposition on the keyboard that could not appear in a name. He did not record the first message and later said it was probably "QWERTYUIOP" or similar. Email is eighteen years older than the Web.

## Common questions

### Which came first, Amazon or email?

email, by 23 years — 1971 against 1994.

### When did Amazon start?

1994. Jeff Bezos incorporated the company in Washington state.

### When did email start?

1971. Ray Tomlinson sent the first message between two computers and chose the @ sign.

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## Sources

- Wikidata — Wikimedia Foundation (https://www.wikidata.org/) [CC0 1.0]