---
title: "Which came first, the Macintosh or Twitter?"
description: "the Macintosh vs Twitter: the Macintosh came first, by 22 years — 1984 against 2006. What happened in each case, and why the dates are often given differently."
url: https://atoneplace.net/which-came-first/macintosh-vs-twitter/
site: "At One Place"
---

# Which came first, the Macintosh or Twitter?

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

1984 — 22 years before Twitter

the Macintosh came first, by 22 years. Apple launched the first Macintosh, two days after the Super Bowl advert.

## Side by side

|  | the Macintosh | Twitter |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Year | 1984 | 2006 |
| Date | 1984-01-24 | 2006-03-21 |
| Category | technology | technology |
| What happened | Apple launched the first Macintosh, two days after the Super Bowl advert. | Jack Dorsey posted the first tweet. |

## 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.

## 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, the Macintosh or Twitter?

the Macintosh, by 22 years — 1984 against 2006.

### When did the Macintosh start?

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

### When did Twitter start?

2006. Jack Dorsey posted the first tweet.

## Related pages

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- [the Macintosh or Python?](https://atoneplace.net/which-came-first/macintosh-vs-python/)
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## Sources

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