The term cookie, as in web cookie, began its life as magic cookie. A bit of jockey jargon used by Unix developers

to refer to a packet of data shared between machines or programs, often to check whether one

had the permissions required to access the other, or to access some hidden compartment of that other machine or program.

This concept was applied to the internet in the early days of the web, when a developer working

at Netscape, the maker of one of the earliest, most popular, graphical web browsers, was tasked

with figuring out how to enable e-commerce without requiring the host of the

site doing the selling to maintain a stable of temporary partial sales states. Basically, they didn't

want to use up tons of space and processing power on their own computers for gobs of not yet complete purchases,

storing information about what's in the shopping cart and things of that nature.

So they asked for another way of accomplishing the same thing

that wasn't so resource intensive for the owner of such sites.

That developer, an employee named Lou Montulli, thought it might be possible

to use this magic cookie concept for the web as well, and he wrote the first specification

for accomplishing this saving of states on the users machine in late 1994. As a result of this innovation,

which he patented in 1998, in web parlance today, a cookie is a tiny bit of data stored on

one computer that allows it to tell another computer something about its state. On a practical level,

this typically means a user visits a website that website downloads via the browser a small file

or code snippet onto that user's computer or checks the state of an existing bit of data of the same kind.

And from that point forward, that code, that cookie, serves as an identifier for the user's computer

when they visit that site and often other sites as well.

When this standard first rolled out to the public in 1994, and then more broadly, across more

browsers in 1995, it wasn't something that the average person had any reason to know about,

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