---
title: "Which came first, the internet (ARPANET) or Twitter?"
description: "the internet (ARPANET) vs Twitter: the internet (ARPANET) came first, by 37 years — 1969 against 2006. What happened in each case."
url: https://atoneplace.net/which-came-first/arpanet-vs-twitter/
site: "At One Place"
---

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

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

1969 — 37 years before Twitter

the internet (ARPANET) came first, by 37 years. The first message was sent between two networked computers.

## Side by side

|  | the internet (ARPANET) | Twitter |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Year | 1969 | 2006 |
| Date | 1969-10-29 | 2006-03-21 |
| Category | technology | technology |
| What happened | The first message was sent between two networked computers. | Jack Dorsey posted the first tweet. |

## 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.

## Twitter

The first tweet — "just setting up my twttr" — went out on 21 March 2006, and the service opened publicly that July. The 140-character limit came from SMS: a text message allows 160 characters and 20 were reserved for the username. When the limit doubled to 280 in 2017 the SMS constraint had been irrelevant for years.

## Common questions

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

the internet (ARPANET), by 37 years — 1969 against 2006.

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

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

### When did Twitter start?

2006. Jack Dorsey posted the first tweet.

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## Sources

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