Which came first, email or Wikipedia?
email came first, by 30 years. Ray Tomlinson sent the first message between two computers and chose the @ sign.
Side by side
| Wikipedia | ||
|---|---|---|
| Year | 1971 | 2001 |
| Date | — | 2001-01-15 |
| Category | technology | technology |
| What happened | Ray Tomlinson sent the first message between two computers and chose the @ sign. | Wikipedia launched as a side project to feed a different encyclopedia. |
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.
Wikipedia
Wikipedia launched in January 2001 as a scratchpad for Nupedia, a peer-reviewed encyclopedia project started in 2000 that had produced about two dozen articles in a year. The wiki produced more than that in its first month and Nupedia was abandoned in 2003. Wikipedia is older than Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and the iPhone.
Common questions
- Which came first, email or Wikipedia?
- email, by 30 years — 1971 against 2001.
- When did email start?
- 1971. Ray Tomlinson sent the first message between two computers and chose the @ sign.
- When did Wikipedia start?
- 2001. Wikipedia launched as a side project to feed a different encyclopedia.
Related pages
- Apple or email? email
- Apple or Wikipedia? Apple
- the internet (ARPANET) or email? the internet (ARPANET)
- the internet (ARPANET) or Wikipedia? 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
Sources
- Wikidata — Wikimedia Foundation (CC0 1.0)