---
title: "Which came first, email or the Macintosh?"
description: "email vs the Macintosh: email came first, by 13 years — 1971 against 1984. What happened in each case, and why the dates are often given differently."
url: https://atoneplace.net/which-came-first/email-vs-macintosh/
site: "At One Place"
---

# Which came first, email or the Macintosh?

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

1971 — 13 years before the Macintosh

email came first, by 13 years. Ray Tomlinson sent the first message between two computers and chose the @ sign.

## Side by side

|  | email | the Macintosh |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Year | 1971 | 1984 |
| Date | — | 1984-01-24 |
| Category | technology | technology |
| What happened | Ray Tomlinson sent the first message between two computers and chose the @ sign. | Apple launched the first Macintosh, two days after the Super Bowl advert. |

## 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 Macintosh

The Macintosh launched in January 1984 with a graphical interface and a mouse, and beat Windows to market by almost two years. Neither invented the idea — Xerox PARC had built the Alto in 1973, and both Apple and Microsoft were working from what they had seen there. Mac OS X, the ancestor of today's macOS, arrived much later in 2001 and is Unix underneath.

## Common questions

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

email, by 13 years — 1971 against 1984.

### When did email start?

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

### When did the Macintosh start?

1984. Apple launched the first Macintosh, two days after the Super Bowl advert.

## Related pages

- [Apple or email?](https://atoneplace.net/which-came-first/apple-vs-email/)
- [Apple or the Macintosh?](https://atoneplace.net/which-came-first/apple-vs-macintosh/)
- [the internet (ARPANET) or email?](https://atoneplace.net/which-came-first/arpanet-vs-email/)
- [the internet (ARPANET) or the Macintosh?](https://atoneplace.net/which-came-first/arpanet-vs-macintosh/)
- [email or Pakistan?](https://atoneplace.net/which-came-first/email-vs-pakistan/)
- [email or India?](https://atoneplace.net/which-came-first/email-vs-india/)
- [email or Microsoft?](https://atoneplace.net/which-came-first/email-vs-microsoft/)
- [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 Java?](https://atoneplace.net/which-came-first/email-vs-java/)
- [email or JavaScript?](https://atoneplace.net/which-came-first/email-vs-javascript/)

## Sources

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