---
title: "Which came first, email or Python?"
description: "email vs Python: email came first, by 20 years — 1971 against 1991. What happened in each case, and why the dates are often given differently."
url: https://atoneplace.net/which-came-first/email-vs-python/
site: "At One Place"
---

# Which came first, email or Python?

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

1971 — 20 years before Python

email came first, by 20 years. Ray Tomlinson sent the first message between two computers and chose the @ sign.

## Side by side

|  | email | Python |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Year | 1971 | 1991 |
| Date | — | 1991-02-20 |
| Category | technology | technology |
| What happened | Ray Tomlinson sent the first message between two computers and chose the @ sign. | Guido van Rossum released version 0.9.0 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.

## Python

Python was started as a hobby project over Christmas 1989 and first released publicly in February 1991 — four years before Java, JavaScript, PHP and Ruby, all of which arrived in 1995. Most people assume it is much newer because its popularity arrived twenty years after it did. It is named after Monty Python, not the snake.

## Common questions

### Which came first, email or Python?

email, by 20 years — 1971 against 1991.

### When did email start?

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

### When did Python start?

1991. Guido van Rossum released version 0.9.0 publicly.

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## Sources

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