---
title: "Which came first, the internet (ARPANET) or the Great Pyramid "
description: "the internet (ARPANET) vs the Great Pyramid of Giza: the Great Pyramid of Giza came first, by 4,529 years — 2,560 BCE against 1969. What happened in each case."
url: https://atoneplace.net/which-came-first/arpanet-vs-great-pyramid/
site: "At One Place"
---

# Which came first, the internet (ARPANET) or the Great Pyramid of Giza?

**Which came first, the internet (ARPANET) or the Great Pyramid of Giza?: the Great Pyramid of Giza**

2,560 BCE — 4,529 years before the internet (ARPANET)

the Great Pyramid of Giza came first, by 4,529 years. Khufu's pyramid was completed at Giza.

## Side by side

|  | the internet (ARPANET) | the Great Pyramid of Giza |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Year | 1969 | 2,560 BCE |
| Date | 1969-10-29 | — |
| Category | technology | landmark |
| What happened | The first message was sent between two networked computers. | Khufu's pyramid was completed at Giza. |

## 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.

## the Great Pyramid of Giza

The Great Pyramid was finished around 2560 BC and remained the tallest structure on Earth for about 3,800 years, until Lincoln Cathedral's spire in 1311. The comparison worth holding on to is Cleopatra: she was born in 69 BC, roughly 2,500 years after the pyramid was built, and lived roughly 2,000 years before us. The pyramid was more ancient to Cleopatra than Cleopatra is to anyone reading this.

## Common questions

### Which came first, the internet (ARPANET) or the Great Pyramid of Giza?

the Great Pyramid of Giza, by 4,529 years — 2,560 BCE against 1969.

### When did the internet (ARPANET) start?

1969. The first message was sent between two networked computers.

### When did the Great Pyramid of Giza start?

2,560 BCE. Khufu's pyramid was completed at Giza.

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## Sources

- Wikidata — Wikimedia Foundation (https://www.wikidata.org/) [CC0 1.0]
- Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History — Smithsonian Institution (https://naturalhistory.si.edu/)