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Which came first, Java or Wikipedia?

Which came first, Java or Wikipedia?
Java
1995 — 6 years before Wikipedia

Java came first, by 6 years. Sun Microsystems announced Java publicly.

Side by side

Java Wikipedia
Year 1995 2001
Date 1995-05-23 2001-01-15
Category technology technology
What happened Sun Microsystems announced Java publicly. Wikipedia launched as a side project to feed a different encyclopedia.

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.

Wikipedia

Wikipedia launched in January 2001 as a scratchpad for Nupedia, a peer-reviewed encyclopedia project started in 2000 that had produced about two dozen articles in a year. The wiki produced more than that in its first month and Nupedia was abandoned in 2003. Wikipedia is older than Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and the iPhone.

Common questions

Which came first, Java or Wikipedia?
Java, by 6 years — 1995 against 2001.
When did Java start?
1995. Sun Microsystems announced Java publicly.
When did Wikipedia start?
2001. Wikipedia launched as a side project to feed a different encyclopedia.

Related pages

Sources

  1. Wikidata — Wikimedia Foundation (CC0 1.0)

How these figures are compiled and checked