Giving the Web a Memory Cost Its Users Privacy The solution called for each Web site's computer to place a small file on each visitor's machine that would track what the visitor's computer did at that site. Mr. Montulli called his new technology a "persistent client state object," but he had a catchier name in mind, one from earlier days of computing. When machines passed little bits of code back and forth for such purposes as identification, early programmers called the exchanged data "magic cookies." Mr. Montulli would call his invention, a direct descendant, a "cookie."