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== History ==
The term "cookie" was derived from "[[magic cookie]]", which is the packet of data a program receives and sends again unchanged. Magic cookies were already used in computing when computer programmer [[Lou Montulli]] had the idea of using them in Web communications in June 1994.<ref>{{cite news | url = http://www.nytimes.com/2001/09/04/technology/04COOK.html | work=The New York Times | first=John | last=Schwartz | title=Giving Web a Memory Cost Its Users Privacy | date=2001-09-04}}</ref> At the time, he was an employee of [[Netscape Communications]], which was developing an [[e-commerce]] application for a customer. Cookies provided a solution to the problem of reliably implementing a [[Shopping cart software|virtual shopping cart]].<ref name="ks">Jey Kesan and Rajiv Shah. [http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=597543 SSRN.com], Deconstructing Code. Chapter II.B (Netscape's cookies). Yale Journal of Law and Technology, 6, 277–389.</ref><ref name="kristol">David Kristol. HTTP Cookies: Standards, privacy, and politics. ACM Transactions on Internet Technology, 1(2), 151–198, 2001. {{doi|10.1145/502152.502153}} (an expanded version is freely available at [http://
Together with John Giannandrea, Montulli wrote the initial Netscape cookie specification the same year. Version 0.9beta of [[Netscape Navigator|Mosaic Netscape]], released on October 13, 1994,<ref>{{cite web|url=http://wp.netscape.com/newsref/pr/newsrelease1.html |title=Press Release: Netscape Communications Offers New Network Navigator Free On The Internet |publisher=Web.archive.org |date= |accessdate=2010-05-22 |archiveurl = http://web.archive.org/web/20061207145832/http://wp.netscape.com/newsref/pr/newsrelease1.html |archivedate = 2006-12-07}}</ref><ref>{{cite web|url=http://groups.google.com/group/comp.infosystems.www.users/msg/9a210e5f72278328 |title=Usenet Post by Marc Andreessen: Here it is, world! |publisher=Groups.google.com |date=1994-10-13 |accessdate=2010-05-22}}</ref> supported cookies. The first use of cookies (out of the labs) was checking whether visitors to the Netscape website had already visited the site. Montulli applied for a patent for the cookie technology in 1995, and {{Cite patent|US|5774670}} was granted in 1998. Support for cookies was integrated in Internet Explorer in version 2, released in October 1995.<ref>{{cite news|first=Sandi |last=Hardmeier |url=http://www.microsoft.com/windows/IE/community/columns/historyofie.mspx |title=The history of Internet Explorer |publisher=Microsoft |date=2005-08-25 |accessdate=2009-01-04}}</ref>
The introduction of cookies was not widely known to the public at the time. In particular, cookies were accepted by default, and users were not notified of the presence of cookies. Some people were aware of the existence of cookies as early as the first quarter of 1995,<ref>Roger Clarke. [http://www.
The development of the formal cookie specifications was already ongoing. In particular, the first discussions about a formal specification started in April 1995 on the www-talk mailing list. A special working group within the [[Internet Engineering Task Force|IETF]] was formed. Two alternative proposals for introducing state in HTTP transactions had been proposed by Brian Behlendorf and David Kristol respectively, but the group, headed by Kristol himself, soon decided to use the Netscape specification as a starting point. On February 1996, the working group identified third-party cookies as a considerable privacy threat. The specification produced by the group was eventually published as RFC 2109 in February 1997. It specifies that third-party cookies were either not allowed at all, or at least not enabled by default.
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