---
title: "Which came first, Java or Wikipedia?"
description: "Java vs Wikipedia: Java came first, by 6 years — 1995 against 2001. What happened in each case, and why the dates are often given differently."
url: https://atoneplace.net/which-came-first/java-vs-wikipedia/
site: "At One Place"
---

# 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.

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## Sources

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