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Which came first, the internet (ARPANET) or email?

Which came first, the internet (ARPANET) or email?
the internet (ARPANET)
1969 — 2 years before email

the internet (ARPANET) came first, by 2 years. The first message was sent between two networked computers.

Side by side

the internet (ARPANET) email
Year 1969 1971
Date 1969-10-29 —
Category technology technology
What happened The first message was sent between two networked computers. Ray Tomlinson sent the first message between two computers and chose the @ sign.

the internet (ARPANET)

On 29 October 1969 a team at UCLA tried to send the word "login" to Stanford. The system crashed after two characters, so the first message ever sent over the internet's ancestor was "lo". By the end of that year the network had four nodes. The internet is twenty years older than the Web, and confusing the two is the single most common error in this whole subject.

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, the internet (ARPANET) or email?
the internet (ARPANET), by 2 years — 1969 against 1971.
When did the internet (ARPANET) start?
1969. The first message was sent between two networked computers.
When did email start?
1971. Ray Tomlinson sent the first message between two computers and chose the @ sign.

Related pages

Sources

  1. Wikidata — Wikimedia Foundation (CC0 1.0)

How these figures are compiled and checked