---
title: "Which came first, the internet (ARPANET) or Java?"
description: "the internet (ARPANET) vs Java: the internet (ARPANET) came first, by 26 years — 1969 against 1995. What happened in each case."
url: https://atoneplace.net/which-came-first/arpanet-vs-java/
site: "At One Place"
---

# Which came first, the internet (ARPANET) or Java?

**Which came first, the internet (ARPANET) or Java?: the internet (ARPANET)**

1969 — 26 years before Java

the internet (ARPANET) came first, by 26 years. The first message was sent between two networked computers.

## Side by side

|  | the internet (ARPANET) | Java |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Year | 1969 | 1995 |
| Date | 1969-10-29 | 1995-05-23 |
| Category | technology | technology |
| What happened | The first message was sent between two networked computers. | Sun Microsystems announced Java publicly. |

## 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.

## Java

Java was announced in May 1995, having started in 1991 as a project called Oak aimed at interactive television — a market that did not exist yet. Its promise was "write once, run anywhere", achieved by compiling to bytecode for a virtual machine rather than to a specific processor. JavaScript arrived seven months later and was named after it purely as a marketing decision; the two languages are unrelated.

## Common questions

### Which came first, the internet (ARPANET) or Java?

the internet (ARPANET), by 26 years — 1969 against 1995.

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

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

### When did Java start?

1995. Sun Microsystems announced Java publicly.

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## Sources

- Wikidata — Wikimedia Foundation (https://www.wikidata.org/) [CC0 1.0]