---
title: "Which came first, Java or Twitter?"
description: "Java vs Twitter: Java came first, by 11 years — 1995 against 2006. What happened in each case, and why the dates are often given differently."
url: https://atoneplace.net/which-came-first/java-vs-twitter/
site: "At One Place"
---

# Which came first, Java or Twitter?

**Which came first, Java or Twitter?: Java**

1995 — 11 years before Twitter

Java came first, by 11 years. Sun Microsystems announced Java publicly.

## Side by side

|  | Java | Twitter |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Year | 1995 | 2006 |
| Date | 1995-05-23 | 2006-03-21 |
| Category | technology | technology |
| What happened | Sun Microsystems announced Java publicly. | Jack Dorsey posted the first tweet. |

## 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.

## Twitter

The first tweet — "just setting up my twttr" — went out on 21 March 2006, and the service opened publicly that July. The 140-character limit came from SMS: a text message allows 160 characters and 20 were reserved for the username. When the limit doubled to 280 in 2017 the SMS constraint had been irrelevant for years.

## Common questions

### Which came first, Java or Twitter?

Java, by 11 years — 1995 against 2006.

### When did Java start?

1995. Sun Microsystems announced Java publicly.

### When did Twitter start?

2006. Jack Dorsey posted the first tweet.

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## Sources

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