Who coined the term “cookie” for web-browser data?

Lou Montulli coined the term “cookie” for web-browser data.

Montulli was a Netscape engineer who worked on early browser networking. In June 1994, while Netscape was developing an e-commerce system for MCI, he adapted an older computing idea to the web: a small piece of data that a program receives and later returns. That solved a practical problem because HTTP itself does not remember previous requests.

The word came from “magic cookie,” a Unix and programming term for a token or packet of information passed back unchanged. Montulli’s web version let a browser retain state locally and send it back to a server, enabling uses such as shopping carts and login sessions.

Montulli and John Giannandrea wrote the initial Netscape cookie specification in 1994. Cookie support appeared in Mosaic Netscape 0.9beta, released on October 13, 1994. The term therefore did not originate with Vint Cerf, Marc Andreessen, or Tim Berners-Lee, although each is associated with other major parts of internet or web history.