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Which came first, Amazon or Java?

Which came first, Amazon or Java?
Amazon
1994 — one year before Java

Amazon came first, by one year. Jeff Bezos incorporated the company in Washington state.

Side by side

Amazon Java
Year 1994 1995
Date 1994-07-05 1995-05-23
Category technology technology
What happened Jeff Bezos incorporated the company in Washington state. Sun Microsystems announced Java publicly.

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.

Java

Java was announced in May 1995, having started in 1991 as a project called Oak aimed at interactive television — a market that did not exist yet. Its promise was "write once, run anywhere", achieved by compiling to bytecode for a virtual machine rather than to a specific processor. JavaScript arrived seven months later and was named after it purely as a marketing decision; the two languages are unrelated.

Common questions

Which came first, Amazon or Java?
Amazon, by one year — 1994 against 1995.
When did Amazon start?
1994. Jeff Bezos incorporated the company in Washington state.
When did Java start?
1995. Sun Microsystems announced Java publicly.

Related pages

Sources

  1. Wikidata — Wikimedia Foundation (CC0 1.0)

How these figures are compiled and checked