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