---
title: "Which came first, email or YouTube?"
description: "email vs YouTube: email came first, by 34 years — 1971 against 2005. What happened in each case, and why the dates are often given differently."
url: https://atoneplace.net/which-came-first/email-vs-youtube/
site: "At One Place"
---

# Which came first, email or YouTube?

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

1971 — 34 years before YouTube

email came first, by 34 years. Ray Tomlinson sent the first message between two computers and chose the @ sign.

## Side by side

|  | email | YouTube |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Year | 1971 | 2005 |
| Date | — | 2005-02-14 |
| Category | technology | technology |
| What happened | Ray Tomlinson sent the first message between two computers and chose the @ sign. | The domain was registered; the first video followed in April. |

## 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.

## YouTube

The youtube.com domain was registered on Valentine's Day 2005, the first video — "Me at the zoo", 19 seconds of a co-founder at San Diego Zoo — was uploaded on 23 April, and the site opened publicly in the winter. Google bought it in November 2006 for $1.65 billion, about twenty months after the domain was registered. It is younger than Facebook by a year and older than Twitter by one.

## Common questions

### Which came first, email or YouTube?

email, by 34 years — 1971 against 2005.

### When did email start?

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

### When did YouTube start?

2005. The domain was registered; the first video followed in April.

## Related pages

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