What's In a Name? Cookies!

I'm teaching a lesson on persistence in the browser using Local Storage, Session Storage, and Cookies this week. Of course, I found it interesting that two of the mechanisms are called "Storage" while the other is named, "Cookies."

I've used cookies for years, and I always assumed they were named that for a reason along the lines of the "Hansel and Gretal" theory: Cookies were crumbs of information left behind so you could follow your state -- like the fairy tale characters dropped crumbs along their trail to find their way home. Of course, the children's plan was disastrously flawed since woodland creatures consumed the crumbs and they wandered, lost until they were lured to their deaths by the witch living in the gingerbread house. (Note: I know some versions of the story have them surviving the ordeal, but I'm pretty sure in the original version they were the witch's dinner.)

It's a reasonable explanation, and many people would be satisfied with that as I was for years, but I decided to dig further to see if there were any more authoritative answers on the subject.


That's when I came across this wonderful post as BonkersAboutTech titled "Why are Cookies called Cookies?" The author gives you some great technical info about how and why cookies work the way they do, and he offers a paragraph linking to a couple of theories on where the name came from.

Andrew Stuart at DominoPower offers an explanation as to Where Cookies Come From that I find the most compelling primarily because he emailed the guy who invented browser cookies and asked him! Genius! His terse answer is, "Cookies are named after the computer science term 'magic cookie.'" Magic cookies were small packets of data passed around a computer system -- which is part of what a browser cookie does, so that makes sense.

Of course, that begs the question, where does the term "magic cookie" come from?

Bonkers About Tech also links to an explanation that dates back to the early days of Xerox when they had a system that stored information about the user in a small file they called a cookie. The story goes that the developers named it in honor of a character on the Andy Williams show called "Cookie Bear." Plausible, yes. What's more, it's wonderfully bizarre end to my journey. 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Curiosity Digest #11

Image
JavaScript Getting Creative with the Console API! - supercharge your console.log()'s and make monitoring and debugging your app more pleasant. Use $ & $$ Instead of document.querySelector/All in JavaScript without jQuery - for those of you who are Breaking Up With jQuery ... ES6 features in JavaScript - familiarize yourself with some of the most popular ES6 goodies Generating PDFs in Javascript for fun and profit! - Sometimes you want to generate PDFs on the fly, and now you can do so in JavaScript. Making the Move from jQuery to Vue - No, you don't have to give up jQuery, but if you want to transfer everything you've learned using it to Vue, check out this article. Node Next Genpm - A look at some npm alternatives Git A hacker is wiping Git repositories and asking for a ransom - Make sure you're protected! Machine Learning What is Machine Learning? - a primer on what ML is and how it works. Development The 3 Lies Stopp...
Read more

The Command Line and You - Part One

Image
I'm teaching a group of students in a Coding Bootcamp, and one of the first things we're learning about his how to get around a Command Line Interface -- in this class, we have a mix of Mac and PC users, so the former is using Terminal, while the latter is using Git Bash. I'm "seasoned" enough to have worked on DOS computers, where the first thing you saw when you turned on the computer was the blinking cursor next to the C:\> Prompt, very much like what you see in the Windows Command Line (cmd.exe) today. From there, you issued commands to navigate your file structure and launch programs. We didn't know anything else. You had to know your way around the command line to get anything done, like copying files to a floppy disk or launching WordPerfect. Then along came Windows (okay, MacIntosh, then Windows) and for a while there, the Command Line was relegated to an "It's there in case you need it" role. Hidden away, as the computer operat...
Read more

Curiosity Digest #12

Image
JavaScript How does JavaScript Really Work? (Part 1) - If you're curious as to just how JavaScirpt does what it does -- and you should be! -- here's a great article. How does JavaScript Really Work? (Part 2) - see above. Programming languages: Why JavaScript developers are choosing TypeScript - TypeScript is exploding... in a good way. CSS Animating CSS Grid Rows and Columns - New animation support for CSS Grids 10 Interesting JavaScript and CSS Libraries for May 2019 - Some really cool stuff in here, and they put out this list every month! Node Cooking Recipes for Web Applications with Node.js, Express.js and TypeScript  - Bring TypeScript into your node express server. Machine Learning Beginner's guide for Tensor Flow - The basics of Google's machine-learning library. Artificial Intelligence Use this cutting-edge AI text generator to write stories, poems, news articles, and more - Hmm, I might use this to make some posts for ...
Read more