Which company developed the initial Netscape cookie specification in 1994?

Netscape Communications developed the initial Netscape cookie specification in 1994.

The work emerged while Netscape was building an e-commerce application for MCI. MCI wanted a way to support transactions without forcing its servers to retain every user’s partial shopping-cart state. Netscape engineer Lou Montulli proposed using browser-held data, creating a practical mechanism for carrying state between otherwise independent HTTP requests.

Montulli and fellow Netscape engineer John Giannandrea wrote the initial specification. It became associated with Netscape because the company implemented it in its browser and published the early “Netscape-style” cookie behavior. Mosaic Netscape 0.9beta, released on October 13, 1994, supported cookies.

This history explains why the alternatives are misleading. CERN created the original web environment but did not develop this initial cookie specification; MCI helped motivate the commercial use case but was not the implementing company; and Microsoft added cookie support to Internet Explorer later, in version 2 in October 1995.