---
title: "Which came first, email or Microsoft?"
description: "email vs Microsoft: email came first, by 4 years — 1971 against 1975. What happened in each case, and why the dates are often given differently."
url: https://atoneplace.net/which-came-first/email-vs-microsoft/
site: "At One Place"
---

# Which came first, email or Microsoft?

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

1971 — 4 years before Microsoft

email came first, by 4 years. Ray Tomlinson sent the first message between two computers and chose the @ sign.

## Side by side

|  | email | Microsoft |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Year | 1971 | 1975 |
| Date | — | 1975-04-04 |
| Category | technology | company |
| What happened | Ray Tomlinson sent the first message between two computers and chose the @ sign. | Gates and Allen founded Micro-Soft in Albuquerque. |

## 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.

## 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, email or Microsoft?

email, by 4 years — 1971 against 1975.

### When did email start?

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

### 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]