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Which came first, Amazon or the World Wide Web?

Which came first, Amazon or the World Wide Web?
the World Wide Web
1989 — 5 years before Amazon

the World Wide Web came first, by 5 years. Tim Berners-Lee wrote the proposal at CERN.

Side by side

Amazon the World Wide Web
Year 1994 1989
Date 1994-07-05 —
Category technology technology
What happened Jeff Bezos incorporated the company in Washington state. Tim Berners-Lee wrote the proposal at CERN.

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.

the World Wide Web

Berners-Lee circulated his proposal in March 1989, built the first browser and server by the end of 1990, and CERN put the software into the public domain in 1993. The Web is twenty years younger than the internet: the internet is the network, the Web is one service running on it, and email and file transfer both predate the Web by decades. The first website went live in December 1990 and is still online.

Common questions

Which came first, Amazon or the World Wide Web?
the World Wide Web, by 5 years — 1989 against 1994.
When did Amazon start?
1994. Jeff Bezos incorporated the company in Washington state.
When did the World Wide Web start?
1989. Tim Berners-Lee wrote the proposal at CERN.

Related pages

Sources

  1. Wikidata — Wikimedia Foundation (CC0 1.0)

How these figures are compiled and checked