---
title: "Which came first, the internet (ARPANET) or Nintendo?"
description: "the internet (ARPANET) vs Nintendo: Nintendo came first, by 80 years — 1889 against 1969. What happened in each case, and why the dates are often given differently."
url: https://atoneplace.net/which-came-first/arpanet-vs-nintendo/
site: "At One Place"
---

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

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

1889 — 80 years before the internet (ARPANET)

Nintendo came first, by 80 years. Fusajiro Yamauchi began making hanafuda playing cards in Kyoto.

## Side by side

|  | the internet (ARPANET) | Nintendo |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Year | 1969 | 1889 |
| Date | 1969-10-29 | 1889-09-23 |
| Category | technology | company |
| What happened | The first message was sent between two networked computers. | Fusajiro Yamauchi began making hanafuda playing cards in Kyoto. |

## 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.

## Nintendo

Nintendo was founded in 1889 to make handmade hanafuda cards, and it was a playing-card company for about eighty years. It is older than the Ford Motor Company (1903), older than the aeroplane, older than the Eiffel Tower by five months, and older than the modern Olympic Games. Before settling on video games in the 1970s it tried taxis, instant rice and a chain of love hotels.

## Common questions

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

Nintendo, by 80 years — 1889 against 1969.

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

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

### When did Nintendo start?

1889. Fusajiro Yamauchi began making hanafuda playing cards in Kyoto.

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## Sources

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