---
title: "Which came first, Harry Potter or the Macintosh?"
description: "Harry Potter vs the Macintosh: the Macintosh came first, by 13 years — 1984 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-macintosh/
site: "At One Place"
---

# Which came first, Harry Potter or the Macintosh?

**Which came first, Harry Potter or the Macintosh?: the Macintosh**

1984 — 13 years before Harry Potter

the Macintosh came first, by 13 years. Apple launched the first Macintosh, two days after the Super Bowl advert.

## Side by side

|  | Harry Potter | the Macintosh |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Year | 1997 | 1984 |
| Date | 1997-06-26 | 1984-01-24 |
| Category | media | technology |
| What happened | Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone was published in the UK. | Apple launched the first Macintosh, two days after the Super Bowl advert. |

## 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.

## the Macintosh

The Macintosh launched in January 1984 with a graphical interface and a mouse, and beat Windows to market by almost two years. Neither invented the idea — Xerox PARC had built the Alto in 1973, and both Apple and Microsoft were working from what they had seen there. Mac OS X, the ancestor of today's macOS, arrived much later in 2001 and is Unix underneath.

## Common questions

### Which came first, Harry Potter or the Macintosh?

the Macintosh, by 13 years — 1984 against 1997.

### When did Harry Potter start?

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

### When did the Macintosh start?

1984. Apple launched the first Macintosh, two days after the Super Bowl advert.

## Related pages

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## Sources

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