---
title: "Which came first, email or Java?"
description: "email vs Java: email came first, by 24 years — 1971 against 1995. What happened in each case, and why the dates are often given differently."
url: https://atoneplace.net/which-came-first/email-vs-java/
site: "At One Place"
---

# Which came first, email or Java?

**Which came first, email or Java?: email**

1971 — 24 years before Java

email came first, by 24 years. Ray Tomlinson sent the first message between two computers and chose the @ sign.

## Side by side

|  | email | Java |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Year | 1971 | 1995 |
| Date | — | 1995-05-23 |
| Category | technology | technology |
| What happened | Ray Tomlinson sent the first message between two computers and chose the @ sign. | Sun Microsystems announced Java publicly. |

## 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.

## Java

Java was announced in May 1995, having started in 1991 as a project called Oak aimed at interactive television — a market that did not exist yet. Its promise was "write once, run anywhere", achieved by compiling to bytecode for a virtual machine rather than to a specific processor. JavaScript arrived seven months later and was named after it purely as a marketing decision; the two languages are unrelated.

## Common questions

### Which came first, email or Java?

email, by 24 years — 1971 against 1995.

### When did email start?

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

### When did Java start?

1995. Sun Microsystems announced Java publicly.

## Related pages

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- [Apple or Java?](https://atoneplace.net/which-came-first/apple-vs-java/)
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- [email or Windows?](https://atoneplace.net/which-came-first/email-vs-windows/)
- [email or the World Wide Web?](https://atoneplace.net/which-came-first/email-vs-world-wide-web/)
- [email or Python?](https://atoneplace.net/which-came-first/email-vs-python/)
- [email or JavaScript?](https://atoneplace.net/which-came-first/email-vs-javascript/)

## Sources

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