One thing that is slightly misleading about the article is that it talks as if HTTP/1.0 first came into being in 1996, and everyone was using version 0.9 before

One thing that is slightly misleading about the article is that it talks as if HTTP/1.0 first came into being in 1996, and everyone was using version 0.9 before then. In fact, one need only observe that the original spec for adding cookies to HTTP came out in 1994 to realize that HTTP/1.0 must have been widely deployed by then. In fact, it is only the standard that took until 1996 to write up.