---
title: "Which came first, email or Wikipedia?"
description: "email vs Wikipedia: email came first, by 30 years — 1971 against 2001. What happened in each case, and why the dates are often given differently."
url: https://atoneplace.net/which-came-first/email-vs-wikipedia/
site: "At One Place"
---

# Which came first, email or Wikipedia?

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

1971 — 30 years before Wikipedia

email came first, by 30 years. Ray Tomlinson sent the first message between two computers and chose the @ sign.

## Side by side

|  | email | 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. |

## 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.

## 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.

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## Sources

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