---
title: "Which came first, email or Netflix?"
description: "email vs Netflix: email came first, by 26 years — 1971 against 1997. What happened in each case, and why the dates are often given differently."
url: https://atoneplace.net/which-came-first/email-vs-netflix/
site: "At One Place"
---

# Which came first, email or Netflix?

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

1971 — 26 years before Netflix

email came first, by 26 years. Ray Tomlinson sent the first message between two computers and chose the @ sign.

## Side by side

|  | email | Netflix |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Year | 1971 | 1997 |
| Date | — | 1997-08-29 |
| Category | technology | technology |
| What happened | Ray Tomlinson sent the first message between two computers and chose the @ sign. | Reed Hastings and Marc Randolph founded a DVD rental-by-post company. |

## 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.

## Netflix

Netflix was founded in August 1997, a year before Google, and posted DVDs for a decade before streaming launched in January 2007. The famous origin story — Hastings founding it after a $40 late fee on Apollo 13 — has been called a useful myth by co-founder Marc Randolph. Blockbuster declined to buy the company for $50 million in 2000.

## Common questions

### Which came first, email or Netflix?

email, by 26 years — 1971 against 1997.

### When did email start?

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

### When did Netflix start?

1997. Reed Hastings and Marc Randolph founded a DVD rental-by-post company.

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## Sources

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