- From: Dave Kristol <dmk@acm.org>
- Date: Thu, 24 Oct 2002 09:19:10 -0400
- To: Gyula Lanyi <gyulanyi@sympatico.ca>
- Cc: http-wg@cuckoo.hpl.hp.com
Gyula Lanyi wrote: > Hi, my name is Tunde (I am a student) and I'm doing a research about > cookies. So far, I've got lots of information about them, but I couldn't > figure out who invented it and when, and what was its original purpose. > If you, please, can help me, how and where to find out more about the > "cookie-history", I would be very thankful. The short answer to your question is that Lou Montulli invented cookies at Netscape sometime in 1994 to facilitate electronic commerce applications. I suggest two resources: 1) The Cookie Central web site (cookiecentral.com) contains lots of information about cookies, though I don't see any specific section on history. 2) My paper, "HTTP Cookies: Standards, Privacy, and Politics," available at <http://arXiv.org/abs/cs.SE/0105018> (and published in roughly the same form in ACM Transactions on Internet Technology, Vol.1, #2, Nov., 2001) covers the evolution of the HTTP standard, which isn't exactly what you want. (However, look at the first section of the Appendix.) Dave Kristol
Received on Thursday, 24 October 2002 09:22:52 UTC