---
title: "Which came first, email or Twitter?"
description: "email vs Twitter: email came first, by 35 years — 1971 against 2006. What happened in each case, and why the dates are often given differently."
url: https://atoneplace.net/which-came-first/email-vs-twitter/
site: "At One Place"
---

# Which came first, email or Twitter?

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

1971 — 35 years before Twitter

email came first, by 35 years. Ray Tomlinson sent the first message between two computers and chose the @ sign.

## Side by side

|  | email | Twitter |
| --- | --- | --- |
| 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. |

## 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.

## Twitter

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?](https://atoneplace.net/which-came-first/apple-vs-email/)
- [the internet (ARPANET) or email?](https://atoneplace.net/which-came-first/arpanet-vs-email/)
- [the internet (ARPANET) or Twitter?](https://atoneplace.net/which-came-first/arpanet-vs-twitter/)
- [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 the Macintosh?](https://atoneplace.net/which-came-first/email-vs-macintosh/)
- [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]