---
title: "Which came first, the internet (ARPANET) or Mario?"
description: "the internet (ARPANET) vs Mario: the internet (ARPANET) came first, by 12 years — 1969 against 1981. What happened in each case."
url: https://atoneplace.net/which-came-first/arpanet-vs-super-mario/
site: "At One Place"
---

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

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

1969 — 12 years before Mario

the internet (ARPANET) came first, by 12 years. The first message was sent between two networked computers.

## Side by side

|  | the internet (ARPANET) | Mario |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Year | 1969 | 1981 |
| Date | 1969-10-29 | — |
| Category | technology | media |
| What happened | The first message was sent between two networked computers. | Mario debuted as "Jumpman" in the arcade game Donkey Kong. |

## 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.

## Mario

Mario first appeared in Donkey Kong in 1981, credited as Jumpman, four years before Super Mario Bros. of 1985 made him a household name. He wears a cap because animating hair at that resolution was impossible, and dungarees because they made his arm movements legible against his body — the design is entirely a consequence of an 16×16 pixel sprite.

## Common questions

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

the internet (ARPANET), by 12 years — 1969 against 1981.

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

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

### When did Mario start?

1981. Mario debuted as "Jumpman" in the arcade game Donkey Kong.

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## Sources

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