Possible opponents:

Newer

First MRI on a human body (1977)
- The first nuclear magnetic resonance image ☢️ was published in 1973, just before the creation of SQL, but the first MRI scan on a human being 🧑 was in 1977 🕺, several years after the creation of SQL.
- Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_magnetic_resonance_imaging#Imaging
Email (1975)
- Like most origin stories, this one is fuzzy and hard to pin down. Something that could be described as “electronic mail” in the context of computers has been around since the 1960s… but it wasn’t described that way, until later. The Oxford English Dictionary has the first quotation of a modern usage of “electronic mail” in 1975 with “E-mail” coming later in 1979. Whichever you choose, both came after SQL.
- Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_email

Floppy disk (1971 marketed, patented in 1972)
- The floppy disk is well in the rearview mirror now in 2023, but it was a powerhouse for moving data around for 30+ years. The first floppy disk was marketed by IBM in 1971 and was patented in 1972 making the floppy disk slightly older than SQL.

Post-It notes (also 1974) This one is a bit of a trick question. The Post-It note could have been created in 1968 when Dr. Spencer Silver created the adhesive, but it wasn’t until 1974 — the year SQL was created, when one of his colleagues discovered it worked well to hold his bookmark in place.

Sometimes your first job just isn’t a great fit. We at EdgeDB are hopeful that someday SQL will find its own second life as something besides the most commonly used language for querying a database. 😅