---
title: "Which came first, the internet (ARPANET) or JavaScript?"
description: "the internet (ARPANET) vs JavaScript: 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-javascript/
site: "At One Place"
---

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

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

1969 — 26 years before JavaScript

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

## Side by side

|  | the internet (ARPANET) | JavaScript |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Year | 1969 | 1995 |
| Date | 1969-10-29 | — |
| Category | technology | technology |
| What happened | The first message was sent between two networked computers. | Brendan Eich wrote it in ten days for Netscape Navigator. |

## 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.

## JavaScript

JavaScript was written in about ten days in May 1995, shipped in Netscape Navigator 2.0 later that year, and was called LiveScript until December, when Netscape renamed it as part of a marketing deal with Sun. It has nothing to do with Java beyond some borrowed syntax. Standardisation as ECMAScript followed in 1997, and the language spent a decade being treated as a toy before it became the most widely deployed programming language in the world.

## Common questions

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

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 JavaScript start?

1995. Brendan Eich wrote it in ten days for Netscape Navigator.

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## Sources

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