---
title: "Which came first, Java or the Macintosh?"
description: "Java vs the Macintosh: the Macintosh came first, by 11 years — 1984 against 1995. What happened in each case, and why the dates are often given differently."
url: https://atoneplace.net/which-came-first/java-vs-macintosh/
site: "At One Place"
---

# Which came first, Java or the Macintosh?

**Which came first, Java or the Macintosh?: the Macintosh**

1984 — 11 years before Java

the Macintosh came first, by 11 years. Apple launched the first Macintosh, two days after the Super Bowl advert.

## Side by side

|  | Java | the Macintosh |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Year | 1995 | 1984 |
| Date | 1995-05-23 | 1984-01-24 |
| Category | technology | technology |
| What happened | Sun Microsystems announced Java publicly. | Apple launched the first Macintosh, two days after the Super Bowl advert. |

## 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.

## 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, Java or the Macintosh?

the Macintosh, by 11 years — 1984 against 1995.

### When did Java start?

1995. Sun Microsystems announced Java publicly.

### When did the Macintosh start?

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

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## Sources

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