“The name ‘cookie’ comes from a comparison to an unopened fortune cookie, because of the hidden information inside.”
In case anyone else was pondering the etymology of those little text files, there you go. Thanks, Wikipedia.
Remember when people were terrified of these things? Terrified of despicable marketers shadowing us across the internet, using our hard drive space to record our every move? When I was in college, with Netscape 6 as my browser, I enabled a setting that would prompt me, for every cookie, whether I would authorize or block it. Whenever I went to a new website I would get like four or five of those things. God, I wasted so much time in college.