History of Computers - Lou Montulli

Overview

Lou Montulli is one of the first people to start working on the internet browser. His first work started in College at the University of Kansas in 1991 were he started working on a program that eventually turned into Lynx. While working on lynx, Lou was heavily involved with the development of HTTP and HTML and web proxying ^[1]. He started working on Netscape in 1994. During that time, he wanted to add "memory" for individual users to the http and www tags. Daily items like shopping carts for shopping, personalized content, logging in, and many other interactive features require memory.The cookie was named after "magic cookies" from operating systems course from college. Lou is also credited with the <blink>Tag</blink>. This tag plagued the internet by making words blink. It was originally designed as an easter egg that was benign. Lou says it was the worst thing that he did for the internet. Apart from cookies and the blink tag, Lou also wrote Lynx which was one of the first internet browsers. Lou is now the Co-founder & Chief Scientist at Zetta.net.

Significance

The significance of Lou Montulli were his innovations to the internet such as cookies which we use on a day to day basis. His work on the internet shaped the internet we see today. Sites like Amazon.com would not be able to keep track of your shopping cart without his innovations of the cookie.