---
title: "Which came first, the internet (ARPANET) or the United States?"
description: "the internet (ARPANET) vs the United States: the United States came first, by 193 years — 1776 against 1969. What happened in each case."
url: https://atoneplace.net/which-came-first/arpanet-vs-united-states/
site: "At One Place"
---

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

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

1776 — 193 years before the internet (ARPANET)

the United States came first, by 193 years. The Declaration of Independence was adopted.

## Side by side

|  | the internet (ARPANET) | the United States |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Year | 1969 | 1776 |
| Date | 1969-10-29 | 1776-07-04 |
| Category | technology | country |
| What happened | The first message was sent between two networked computers. | The Declaration of Independence was adopted. |

## 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.

## the United States

The date used here is the Declaration, 4 July 1776, which is the one people mean. Two others have equal claim: Britain recognised independence in 1783, and the Constitution took effect in 1789, so the current government is younger than the country by thirteen years. The United States is older as a state than Germany (1871), Italy (1861), Canada (1867) and modern Japan (1868).

## Common questions

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

the United States, by 193 years — 1776 against 1969.

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

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

### When did the United States start?

1776. The Declaration of Independence was adopted.

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## Sources

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