Silicon Insider: Burning Questions
Oct. 2 -- Editor's Note: With Forbes ASAP editor-at-large Michael Malone on a brief hiatus, his colleagues offer up answers to intriguing questions about business, technology and whatever else strikes their fancy.
QUESTION: Who was the first person to envision the Internet?
In his 1934 Traité de Documentation, a Belgian lawyer named Paul Otlet conceived of a Universal Network of Information and Documentation, in which access would be gained through multimedia stations that lay waiting to be invented.
In 1938, H.G. Wells, who tended to see engineers as the saviors of the world, published World Brain, which advocated the development of an encyclopedia to provide a systematic ordering of human thought and to act as a sort of super university.
Of course, Tim Berners-Lee created the World Wide Web, while Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina created a way to navigate it, but they're relative newcomers.
QUESTION: Who invented cookies and how did they get that name?
Cookies (a way for Web sites to secretly know is is visiting) originally had a different meaning. Legend has it that in 1970 an IBM computer operator at Brown University, who allegedly locked users out of their terminals until they typed the word cookies, inspired two MIT students to create a similar program.
Why cookies? One theory is that the name refers to a popular cookie-bear character from a 1960s commercial. The current meaning of cookies came into being in 1994, when Lou Montulli, one of Netscape's founding engineers, concocted the first batch of Web cookies as simple mechanisms to make it easier for users to access their favorite Web sites without going through a lengthy process of identifying themselves each time. The man People magazine named the "Sexiest Internet Mogul" in 1999 had no idea that the invention would spark a debate over privacy issues.
QUESTION: Does the Web site of the Girl Scouts of America contain cookies?
Yes.
Michael S. Malone, once called “the Boswell of Silicon Valley,” is editor-at-large of Forbes ASAP magazine. His work as the nation’s first daily high-tech reporter at the San Jose Mercury-News sparked the writing of his critically acclaimed The Big Score: The Billion Dollar Story of Silicon Valley, which went on to become a public TV series. He has written several other highly praised business books and a novel about Silicon Valley, where he was raised. For more, go to Forbes.com. And you can talk back to Silicon Insider via e-mail.
