In October, we at Bïrch held a big company-wide convention where different teams had interesting things to say about their work. The development team taught us how to program, but before that the guys gave a short lecture about the web (and did a quiz at the end).
During the lecture we talked about cookies among other things — you know those endless pop-ups that ask you if you're ready to accept cookies, stuff like that. True, no cookies are given to us in the end, and we ourselves (or rather, the data about us) serve as the sweet. But let's not talk about the sad stuff. We wondered at the lecture, why are cookies called that at all?
Hansel and Gretel
The most popular theory has to do with the German folktale by the Grimm brothers. The fairy tale is quite psychedelic, we warn you at once. What is worth the ogre witch who lives in a house made of gingerbread?
Come on, we're interested in the cookies! The thing is that in the course of the fairy tale, the two main characters, Hansel and Gretel, scatter cookie crumbs along the road to find their way home from the magical forest. So too, the browser uses cookies to “find its way” to the user on a website.
The Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm (1881), illustration by Heinrich Merté.
It's a beautiful legend, isn't it? But it has nothing to do with reality.
Magic cookies and Unix
The term Cookies was first used by Lou Montulli, a developer and co-founder of Netscape Communications, in 1994.
Lou Montulli was an experienced programmer, and started working back in the days when a computer did not fit not only on your lap, but even on a desk. He wrote C code for Unix operating systems. Unix had a thing called Magic cookies, which were small blocks of data that were passed between programs. Louis decided that browsers and servers could also pass Magic cookies to each other.
But why are these cookies magical?
Because, uh. LSD. We're not kidding.
The term Magic Cookies migrated to UNIX directly from the hippie world. In the 1970s and beyond, programmers and hackers were often hippies who dragged everything they loved into their work. This included psilocybin mushrooms, acid, and all sorts of other not-so-permitted substances.
And the phrase Magic Cookies itself first appeared in a Dan O'neil comic strip. He had been drawin the San Francisco Chronicle magazine comic strip Odd Bodkins since the mid-1960s. The comic called LSD an ephemerism for Magic Cookies: everyone knew what it meant, but the author could not be directly accused of popularizing drugs. In comics, the heroes in general loved Magic Cookies (as did the author himself, of course).
Dan O’Neill’s Magic Cookie Land, from his Odd Bodkins comic series.
That's how “acid” got into comic books, from them into old computer programs and operating systems, and from them into our browsers.
