---
title: "Which came first, email or the iPhone?"
description: "email vs the iPhone: email came first, by 36 years — 1971 against 2007. What happened in each case, and why the dates are often given differently."
url: https://atoneplace.net/which-came-first/email-vs-iphone/
site: "At One Place"
---

# Which came first, email or the iPhone?

**Which came first, email or the iPhone?: email**

1971 — 36 years before the iPhone

email came first, by 36 years. Ray Tomlinson sent the first message between two computers and chose the @ sign.

## Side by side

|  | email | the iPhone |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Year | 1971 | 2007 |
| Date | — | 2007-06-29 |
| Category | technology | technology |
| What happened | Ray Tomlinson sent the first message between two computers and chose the @ sign. | The first iPhone went on sale after a January announcement. |

## email

Messages had been left for other users of the same machine since the mid-1960s. What Tomlinson did in 1971 was send one between two different computers on ARPANET, and pick @ to separate the user from the host because it was the only preposition on the keyboard that could not appear in a name. He did not record the first message and later said it was probably "QWERTYUIOP" or similar. Email is eighteen years older than the Web.

## the iPhone

Announced on 9 January 2007 and on sale from 29 June, the first iPhone had no app store, no copy and paste, no 3G and no video recording. The App Store arrived over a year later in July 2008. Android Inc. had been founded in 2003, four years before the iPhone, but the first Android phone shipped fifteen months after it.

## Common questions

### Which came first, email or the iPhone?

email, by 36 years — 1971 against 2007.

### When did email start?

1971. Ray Tomlinson sent the first message between two computers and chose the @ sign.

### When did the iPhone start?

2007. The first iPhone went on sale after a January announcement.

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## Sources

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