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Which came first, Netflix or the World Wide Web?

Which came first, Netflix or the World Wide Web?
the World Wide Web
1989 — 8 years before Netflix

the World Wide Web came first, by 8 years. Tim Berners-Lee wrote the proposal at CERN.

Side by side

Netflix the World Wide Web
Year 1997 1989
Date 1997-08-29
Category technology technology
What happened Reed Hastings and Marc Randolph founded a DVD rental-by-post company. Tim Berners-Lee wrote the proposal at CERN.

Netflix

Netflix was founded in August 1997, a year before Google, and posted DVDs for a decade before streaming launched in January 2007. The famous origin story — Hastings founding it after a $40 late fee on Apollo 13 — has been called a useful myth by co-founder Marc Randolph. Blockbuster declined to buy the company for $50 million in 2000.

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, Netflix or the World Wide Web?
the World Wide Web, by 8 years — 1989 against 1997.
When did Netflix start?
1997. Reed Hastings and Marc Randolph founded a DVD rental-by-post company.
When did the World Wide Web start?
1989. Tim Berners-Lee wrote the proposal at CERN.

Related pages

Sources

  1. Wikidata — Wikimedia Foundation (CC0 1.0)

How these figures are compiled and checked