I suspect that they are an oblique reference to "fortune cookies", which provide you with a brief message telling you what your future will be, or not. Cookies, in the computing sense, are brief messages. I haven't looked this up, however.

I have never heard anything about how "cookies" got the name, nor can I see how as a figure of speech they make any sense.The only good I see that they do any good it to tell wordsmith.org I am a member, and tell Amazon my credit is good. The idea that other Internet predators can use them frosts me. I periodically erase them, but it means I have to enter my AWAD ID again.

and i thought it was from the 'crumbs' they leave behind in your computer..

Actually, the word cookie is used for other things besides food, there are joiner that use "biscuts", and a "cookie" has been used to define a cardboard or plactic thingy you insert in a machine.

long, long ago, sewing machines had removeable, interchangealbe "cams" for creating special zig-zag stiches. these cams where also called plastic cookies.

the cam (cookie) stored information (the stitch!) electronic cookies store information too.

maybe one of the guys out there can think of an other specific machine that uses a cookie.

I couldn't find why they're called that either--frustratingly enough, I think I was told it long ago! For a good explanation of how cookies work and are used, you could try this site:
http://cookiecentral.com/content.phtml?area=2&id=1 This is a commercial site--they offer several kinds of things to control cookies, I noticed.

I also found a place for some cute font downloads, if anyone's interested:
http://www.fontfoundry.com/

From the site you cite:

http://www.cookiecentral.com/faq/#1.2


According to an article written by Paul Bonner for Builder.Com on 11/18/1997:

"Lou Montulli, currently the protocols manager in Netscape's client product division, wrote the cookies specification for Navigator 1.0, the first browser to use the technology. Montulli says there's nothing particularly amusing about the origin of the name: 'A cookie is a well-known computer science term that is used when describing an opaque piece of data held by an intermediary. The term fits the usage precisely; it's just not a well-known term outside of computer science circles.'"


Opaque refers to the fact that the data could be anything and you're not even sure of the format.


Browsers are 'stateless,' meaning they don't remember things. Cookies solve this problem (and create others). http://comp20.eecs.tufts.edu/g/20/notes/cgi_mult.php3 explains this in shorthand form.


For general usage, check out http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/jargon/html/entry/cookie.html

http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/jargon/html/entry/magic-cookie.html

Here's an example of how cookie is used on the net outside of the web
http://playground.sun.com/pub/nfsv4/nfsv4-wg-archive/1997/0188.html


(While I've done a minimal amount of web programming, I have never used cookies and I don't claim to have any special insight into their usage. However, the theory seems simple enough.)


k