Which came first, email or Twitter?
email came first, by 35 years. Ray Tomlinson sent the first message between two computers and chose the @ sign.
Side by side
| Year | 1971 | 2006 |
|---|---|---|
| Date | — | 2006-03-21 |
| Category | technology | technology |
| What happened | Ray Tomlinson sent the first message between two computers and chose the @ sign. | Jack Dorsey posted the first tweet. |
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 first tweet — "just setting up my twttr" — went out on 21 March 2006, and the service opened publicly that July. The 140-character limit came from SMS: a text message allows 160 characters and 20 were reserved for the username. When the limit doubled to 280 in 2017 the SMS constraint had been irrelevant for years.
Common questions
- Which came first, email or Twitter?
- email, by 35 years — 1971 against 2006.
- When did email start?
- 1971. Ray Tomlinson sent the first message between two computers and chose the @ sign.
- When did Twitter start?
- 2006. Jack Dorsey posted the first tweet.
Related pages
- Apple or email? email
- the internet (ARPANET) or email? the internet (ARPANET)
- the internet (ARPANET) or Twitter? the internet (ARPANET)
- email or Pakistan? Pakistan
- email or India? India
- email or Microsoft? email
- email or the Macintosh? email
- email or Windows? email
- email or the World Wide Web? email
- email or Python? email
- email or Java? email
- email or JavaScript? email
Sources
- Wikidata — Wikimedia Foundation (CC0 1.0)