---
title: "Which came first, Microsoft or the World Wide Web?"
description: "Microsoft vs the World Wide Web: Microsoft came first, by 14 years — 1975 against 1989. What happened in each case, and why the dates are often given differently."
url: https://atoneplace.net/which-came-first/microsoft-vs-world-wide-web/
site: "At One Place"
---

# Which came first, Microsoft or the World Wide Web?

**Which came first, Microsoft or the World Wide Web?: Microsoft**

1975 — 14 years before the World Wide Web

Microsoft came first, by 14 years. Gates and Allen founded Micro-Soft in Albuquerque.

## Side by side

|  | Microsoft | the World Wide Web |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Year | 1975 | 1989 |
| Date | 1975-04-04 | — |
| Category | company | technology |
| What happened | Gates and Allen founded Micro-Soft in Albuquerque. | Tim Berners-Lee wrote the proposal at CERN. |

## Microsoft

Microsoft was founded in April 1975 to sell a BASIC interpreter for the Altair 8800 — a product they had demonstrated before writing all of it. It predates Apple by almost exactly one year. The hyphen was dropped in 1976 and the company moved to Washington state in 1979.

## the World Wide Web

Berners-Lee circulated his proposal in March 1989, built the first browser and server by the end of 1990, and CERN put the software into the public domain in 1993. The Web is twenty years younger than the internet: the internet is the network, the Web is one service running on it, and email and file transfer both predate the Web by decades. The first website went live in December 1990 and is still online.

## Common questions

### Which came first, Microsoft or the World Wide Web?

Microsoft, by 14 years — 1975 against 1989.

### When did Microsoft start?

1975. Gates and Allen founded Micro-Soft in Albuquerque.

### When did the World Wide Web start?

1989. Tim Berners-Lee wrote the proposal at CERN.

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## Sources

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