---
title: "Which came first, the internet (ARPANET) or Microsoft?"
description: "the internet (ARPANET) vs Microsoft: the internet (ARPANET) came first, by 6 years — 1969 against 1975. What happened in each case."
url: https://atoneplace.net/which-came-first/arpanet-vs-microsoft/
site: "At One Place"
---

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

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

1969 — 6 years before Microsoft

the internet (ARPANET) came first, by 6 years. The first message was sent between two networked computers.

## Side by side

|  | the internet (ARPANET) | Microsoft |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Year | 1969 | 1975 |
| Date | 1969-10-29 | 1975-04-04 |
| Category | technology | company |
| What happened | The first message was sent between two networked computers. | Gates and Allen founded Micro-Soft in Albuquerque. |

## 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.

## Microsoft

Microsoft was founded in April 1975 to sell a BASIC interpreter for the Altair 8800 — a product they had demonstrated before writing all of it. It predates Apple by almost exactly one year. The hyphen was dropped in 1976 and the company moved to Washington state in 1979.

## Common questions

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

the internet (ARPANET), by 6 years — 1969 against 1975.

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

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

### When did Microsoft start?

1975. Gates and Allen founded Micro-Soft in Albuquerque.

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## Sources

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