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

Which came first, the internet (ARPANET) or the iPhone?
the internet (ARPANET)
1969 — 38 years before the iPhone

the internet (ARPANET) came first, by 38 years. The first message was sent between two networked computers.

Side by side

the internet (ARPANET) the iPhone
Year 1969 2007
Date 1969-10-29 2007-06-29
Category technology technology
What happened The first message was sent between two networked computers. The first iPhone went on sale after a January announcement.

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 iPhone

Announced on 9 January 2007 and on sale from 29 June, the first iPhone had no app store, no copy and paste, no 3G and no video recording. The App Store arrived over a year later in July 2008. Android Inc. had been founded in 2003, four years before the iPhone, but the first Android phone shipped fifteen months after it.

Common questions

Which came first, the internet (ARPANET) or the iPhone?
the internet (ARPANET), by 38 years — 1969 against 2007.
When did the internet (ARPANET) start?
1969. The first message was sent between two networked computers.
When did the iPhone start?
2007. The first iPhone went on sale after a January announcement.

Related pages

Sources

  1. Wikidata — Wikimedia Foundation (CC0 1.0)

How these figures are compiled and checked