#web

The web's most famous number has a beloved origin story involving an office at CERN where the first server lived. The web's own pioneers call the story hogwash. The real answer is duller, older, and better: the digits are a sentence, and you can read them.

The Apache web server has two competing origin stories — "a patchy server" built from NCSA httpd patches in 1995, and respect for the Apache Native American nation. The project's own documentation has told both, and which one is "real" has become a live question.

Lou Montulli invented the web cookie at Netscape in June 1994 to give a stateless protocol a memory. The name is borrowed from the Unix "magic cookie" — an opaque token a program hands around — and the privacy story started almost immediately.