The Cookie Technology

cookie history

Cookies were first introduced in Netscape Navigator 1.0, which was released in 1994.

The State Management subworking group of the Internet Engineering Task Force's HTTP Working Group is currently working on creating a formal internet draft for a cookie specification.

Now all major browsers support the use of cookies. Many scripting languages for the web use the cookie as their underlying mechanism for preservation of session states.

According to Netscape's cookie specification, cookies are named as such "for no compelling reason". However, the term cookie isn't uncommon in the computer science community. It's usually used when referring to a piece of data held by an intermediary agent for later retrieval. This description fits the use of the term within the web community.