Which came first, the internet (ARPANET) or sharks?
sharks came first, by 450.002 million years. Shark-like fish were swimming the oceans in the Ordovician.
Side by side
| the internet (ARPANET) | sharks | |
|---|---|---|
| Year | 1969 | 450 million years ago |
| Date | 1969-10-29 | — |
| Category | technology | nature |
| What happened | The first message was sent between two networked computers. | Shark-like fish were swimming the oceans in the Ordovician. |
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.
sharks
Scales from shark-like fish appear around 450 million years ago and unambiguous shark teeth by about 420 million years ago. The first trees appeared roughly 385 million years ago, so sharks predate trees by tens of millions of years. They also predate Saturn's rings on most current estimates, and they have survived all five mass extinctions.
Deep-time dates are approximate to within tens of millions of years and shift as new fossils are found.
Common questions
- Which came first, the internet (ARPANET) or sharks?
- sharks, by 450.002 million years — 450 million years ago against 1969.
- When did the internet (ARPANET) start?
- 1969. The first message was sent between two networked computers.
- When did sharks start?
- 450 million years ago. Shark-like fish were swimming the oceans in the Ordovician.
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Sources
- Wikidata — Wikimedia Foundation (CC0 1.0)
- Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History — Smithsonian Institution