---
title: "Which came first, the internet (ARPANET) or Netflix?"
description: "the internet (ARPANET) vs Netflix: the internet (ARPANET) came first, by 28 years — 1969 against 1997. What happened in each case."
url: https://atoneplace.net/which-came-first/arpanet-vs-netflix/
site: "At One Place"
---

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

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

1969 — 28 years before Netflix

the internet (ARPANET) came first, by 28 years. The first message was sent between two networked computers.

## Side by side

|  | the internet (ARPANET) | Netflix |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Year | 1969 | 1997 |
| Date | 1969-10-29 | 1997-08-29 |
| Category | technology | technology |
| What happened | The first message was sent between two networked computers. | Reed Hastings and Marc Randolph founded a DVD rental-by-post company. |

## 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.

## Netflix

Netflix was founded in August 1997, a year before Google, and posted DVDs for a decade before streaming launched in January 2007. The famous origin story — Hastings founding it after a $40 late fee on Apollo 13 — has been called a useful myth by co-founder Marc Randolph. Blockbuster declined to buy the company for $50 million in 2000.

## Common questions

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

the internet (ARPANET), by 28 years — 1969 against 1997.

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

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

### When did Netflix start?

1997. Reed Hastings and Marc Randolph founded a DVD rental-by-post company.

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## Sources

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