---
title: "Which came first, Wikipedia or Windows?"
description: "Wikipedia vs Windows: Windows came first, by 16 years — 1985 against 2001. What happened in each case, and why the dates are often given differently."
url: https://atoneplace.net/which-came-first/wikipedia-vs-windows/
site: "At One Place"
---

# Which came first, Wikipedia or Windows?

**Which came first, Wikipedia or Windows?: Windows**

1985 — 16 years before Wikipedia

Windows came first, by 16 years. Microsoft shipped Windows 1.0.

## Side by side

|  | Wikipedia | Windows |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Year | 2001 | 1985 |
| Date | 2001-01-15 | 1985-11-20 |
| Category | technology | technology |
| What happened | Wikipedia launched as a side project to feed a different encyclopedia. | Microsoft shipped Windows 1.0. |

## 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.

## 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, Wikipedia or Windows?

Windows, by 16 years — 1985 against 2001.

### When did Wikipedia start?

2001. Wikipedia launched as a side project to feed a different encyclopedia.

### When did Windows start?

1985. Microsoft shipped Windows 1.0.

## Related pages

- [Microsoft or Windows?](https://atoneplace.net/which-came-first/microsoft-vs-windows/)
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- [Windows or YouTube?](https://atoneplace.net/which-came-first/windows-vs-youtube/)
- [Python or Windows?](https://atoneplace.net/which-came-first/python-vs-windows/)

## Sources

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