Cookies

Posted by R. Berg on November 27, 2003

In Reply to: Cookies posted by Skeptic on November 27, 2003

: : I heard on an Andy Williams biography on A&E that he once hosted a TV show which featured a "Cookie Bear," and that people working on the web in the early days, for nostalgic reasons I guess, named the little bits on info on our computers "cookies" after that Cookie Bear.

: Any source for that? I remember the show from when I was a kid, but that doesn't really do much to explain why an i.d. passed back should be a cookie - unless it came from an expression like 'pass round the cookies'.

The explanation I've seen is that "cookie" comes from an early computer virus, the Cookie Monster, that once in a while produced the text "Give me a cookie." You couldn't continue to use the computer until you typed "cookie."