---
title: "Which came first, Harry Potter or Java?"
description: "Harry Potter vs Java: Java came first, by 2 years — 1995 against 1997. What happened in each case, and why the dates are often given differently."
url: https://atoneplace.net/which-came-first/harry-potter-vs-java/
site: "At One Place"
---

# Which came first, Harry Potter or Java?

**Which came first, Harry Potter or Java?: Java**

1995 — 2 years before Harry Potter

Java came first, by 2 years. Sun Microsystems announced Java publicly.

## Side by side

|  | Harry Potter | Java |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Year | 1997 | 1995 |
| Date | 1997-06-26 | 1995-05-23 |
| Category | media | technology |
| What happened | Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone was published in the UK. | Sun Microsystems announced Java publicly. |

## Harry Potter

Bloomsbury published the first book in June 1997 with a print run of 500 copies, most of which went to libraries, after twelve other publishers had rejected the manuscript. The company's chairman gave the first chapter to his eight-year-old daughter, who demanded the rest. It came out the same year as Netflix was founded and a year before Google.

## Java

Java was announced in May 1995, having started in 1991 as a project called Oak aimed at interactive television — a market that did not exist yet. Its promise was "write once, run anywhere", achieved by compiling to bytecode for a virtual machine rather than to a specific processor. JavaScript arrived seven months later and was named after it purely as a marketing decision; the two languages are unrelated.

## Common questions

### Which came first, Harry Potter or Java?

Java, by 2 years — 1995 against 1997.

### When did Harry Potter start?

1997. Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone was published in the UK.

### When did Java start?

1995. Sun Microsystems announced Java publicly.

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## Sources

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