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Which came first, Amazon or Windows?

Which came first, Amazon or Windows?
Windows
1985 — 9 years before Amazon

Windows came first, by 9 years. Microsoft shipped Windows 1.0.

Side by side

Amazon Windows
Year 1994 1985
Date 1994-07-05 1985-11-20
Category technology technology
What happened Jeff Bezos incorporated the company in Washington state. Microsoft shipped Windows 1.0.

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.

Windows

Windows 1.0 shipped in November 1985, twenty-two months after the Macintosh, and it was not an operating system — it was a graphical shell running on top of MS-DOS, and remained so until Windows NT in 1993 and the consumer transition with Windows XP in 2001. Version 1.0 could not even overlap windows: they tiled, because Apple's legal position on overlapping windows was unresolved.

Common questions

Which came first, Amazon or Windows?
Windows, by 9 years — 1985 against 1994.
When did Amazon start?
1994. Jeff Bezos incorporated the company in Washington state.
When did Windows start?
1985. Microsoft shipped Windows 1.0.

Related pages

Sources

  1. Wikidata — Wikimedia Foundation (CC0 1.0)

How these figures are compiled and checked