---
title: "Which came first, Coca-Cola or Microsoft?"
description: "Coca-Cola vs Microsoft: Coca-Cola came first, by 89 years — 1886 against 1975. What happened in each case, and why the dates are often given differently."
url: https://atoneplace.net/which-came-first/coca-cola-vs-microsoft/
site: "At One Place"
---

# Which came first, Coca-Cola or Microsoft?

**Which came first, Coca-Cola or Microsoft?: Coca-Cola**

1886 — 89 years before Microsoft

Coca-Cola came first, by 89 years. John Pemberton first sold his syrup at a pharmacy in Atlanta.

## Side by side

|  | Coca-Cola | Microsoft |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Year | 1886 | 1975 |
| Date | 1886-05-08 | 1975-04-04 |
| Category | company | company |
| What happened | John Pemberton first sold his syrup at a pharmacy in Atlanta. | Gates and Allen founded Micro-Soft in Albuquerque. |

## Coca-Cola

Coca-Cola went on sale in May 1886 as a patent medicine, selling about nine glasses a day in its first year. Pemberton sold the rights for a few thousand dollars and died in 1888 without seeing any of it. Pepsi followed in 1893 under the name Brad's Drink, renamed Pepsi-Cola in 1898 — so Coke is seven years older, and both are older than the Ford Motor Company.

## Microsoft

Microsoft was founded in April 1975 to sell a BASIC interpreter for the Altair 8800 — a product they had demonstrated before writing all of it. It predates Apple by almost exactly one year. The hyphen was dropped in 1976 and the company moved to Washington state in 1979.

## Common questions

### Which came first, Coca-Cola or Microsoft?

Coca-Cola, by 89 years — 1886 against 1975.

### When did Coca-Cola start?

1886. John Pemberton first sold his syrup at a pharmacy in Atlanta.

### When did Microsoft start?

1975. Gates and Allen founded Micro-Soft in Albuquerque.

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## Sources

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