---
title: "Which came first, email or JavaScript?"
description: "email vs JavaScript: 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-javascript/
site: "At One Place"
---

# Which came first, email or JavaScript?

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

1971 — 24 years before JavaScript

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

## Side by side

|  | email | JavaScript |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Year | 1971 | 1995 |
| Category | technology | technology |
| What happened | Ray Tomlinson sent the first message between two computers and chose the @ sign. | Brendan Eich wrote it in ten days for Netscape Navigator. |

## 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.

## JavaScript

JavaScript was written in about ten days in May 1995, shipped in Netscape Navigator 2.0 later that year, and was called LiveScript until December, when Netscape renamed it as part of a marketing deal with Sun. It has nothing to do with Java beyond some borrowed syntax. Standardisation as ECMAScript followed in 1997, and the language spent a decade being treated as a toy before it became the most widely deployed programming language in the world.

## Common questions

### Which came first, email or JavaScript?

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 JavaScript start?

1995. Brendan Eich wrote it in ten days for Netscape Navigator.

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- [email or Python?](https://atoneplace.net/which-came-first/email-vs-python/)
- [email or Java?](https://atoneplace.net/which-came-first/email-vs-java/)

## Sources

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