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Which came first, Twitter or Windows?

Which came first, Twitter or Windows?
Windows
1985 — 21 years before Twitter

Windows came first, by 21 years. Microsoft shipped Windows 1.0.

Side by side

Twitter Windows
Year 2006 1985
Date 2006-03-21 1985-11-20
Category technology technology
What happened Jack Dorsey posted the first tweet. Microsoft shipped Windows 1.0.

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.

Windows

Windows 1.0 shipped in November 1985, twenty-two months after the Macintosh, and it was not an operating system — it was a graphical shell running on top of MS-DOS, and remained so until Windows NT in 1993 and the consumer transition with Windows XP in 2001. Version 1.0 could not even overlap windows: they tiled, because Apple's legal position on overlapping windows was unresolved.

Common questions

Which came first, Twitter or Windows?
Windows, by 21 years — 1985 against 2006.
When did Twitter start?
2006. Jack Dorsey posted the first tweet.
When did Windows start?
1985. Microsoft shipped Windows 1.0.

Related pages

Sources

  1. Wikidata — Wikimedia Foundation (CC0 1.0)

How these figures are compiled and checked