Cisco Logo    History of Cookies  The need for browser cookies
(or just cookies) came about because of the stateless nature of
the HTTP protocol. Netscape (remember them?) was developing an
on-line shopping application for a client and they needed a way
to keep a customer associated with their shopping cart. Nothing
built into HTTP could maintain where on a website a user was
currently browsing or what items were currently placed into
their shopping cart, so that ability needed to be invented. This
issue was solved with the addition of browser cookies. Browser
cookies are small pieces of data in the form of attribute value
pairs or name value pairs that a web server can send to an
Internet browser, which the browser then stores and will send
back to the web server as part of subsequent web requests. That
piece of data can be associated with an entry in the website’s
database and associated with the user’s browsing sessions.  How
They’re Used Today  These attribute value pairs may be seemingly
random strings o