How cookies were baked into web terminology

Apart from SPAM, the other food item that has made its way into tech terminology is the cookie. Before the internet, cookies only came in biscuit-form, normally containing chocolate chips or fortunes, so how did they become part of day-to-day web vernacular?

Being asked to accept cookies is now a standard part of the web browsing user experience.

To start at the beginning, the word cookie comes from the Netherlands, specifically the word koekje, which simply means as 'little cake', from the Dutch word koek meaning 'cake' and the suffix -je to denote something little. Although there is no historical evidence to connect this to the Scottish cookie, a plain round bun that cropped up in the early 1700s and apparently came from the English word 'cook' with the suffix -ie, the Scottish equivalent of the Dutch -je suffix.

"Koekjes" arrived in the United States with the Dutch West India Company in 1624 and the creation of New Amsterdam, the city now called New York, on the southern tip of Manhattan Island. The spelling had changed to the Anglicised "cookies" by the 1850s, although across the pond in England they were and still are referred to as biscuits from the Old French bescoit and the Latin biscotum meaning 'twice cooked' (bis 'twice' + coctum from coquere 'to cook'), the origin of the Italian biscotti.

The popularity of cookies in the United States continued to rise with the invention of the chocolate chip cookie in 1930 but it was the earlier arrival of the fortune cookie that led to the cookie moving into tech vernacular. It might be a surprise but historical evidence suggests the fortune cookie was a Japanese rather than a Chinese creation and was first sold in the United States by Japanese migrants from the late 1890s to early 1900s. They were later adopted by the Chinese and became a popular after dinner treat in Chinese-American restaurants after the Second World War.

Fortune cookies. Photo by Meritt Thomas on Unsplash

Three decades later, clearly inspired by the fortune cookie, Version 7 of Unix was released in January 1979 with a `fortune` command that would display a joke or saying from a database of quotations when it was run. These were known as fortune cookies or cookie files. Coincidentally the Unix manual would also reference the magic cookie, a token or piece of data that was passed from one program to another, which has led some people to believe it is a reference to fortune cookies.

Despite theories about the origin of the magic cookie being a reference to an LSD-laced cookie or the Cookie Monster, who first appeared on Sesame Street in 1971, the founders of Unix offered an alternative origin. When I emailed Ken Thompson, Brian Kernighan and Doug McIlroy asking where the term came from, they all offered the same response - Robert "Bob" Morris, the Bell Labs cryptographer.

Cryptographer Bob Morris introduced the term 'cookie' to Bell Labs in the 1970s.

Professor McIlroy said the term had been in use in the lab before 1979 and that Morris was the person who introduced cookie into their vocabulary:

"It was usually applied to a very short and enigmatic bit of text. He used the word (cookie) in non-computing contexts too. I do not know whether he coined the usage or picked it up elsewhere. In Bob's usage, "cookie" usually stood alone. I suspect "magic" got attached to it by analogy to the comparable term "magic number", which applies to the data structure at the front of an an a.out file."

Sadly Bob Morris died in 2011, possibly taking the secret to the origin of the magic cookie with him. An unfortunate end to my quest for answers but as with some things in life, sometimes that's just the way the cookie crumbles.

How wise men became installation wizards

When you hear the word wizard, it's only natural to think of a magical grandfather figure with a staff and a long grey beard. Depending on your age and reading habits, perhaps Merlin, Gandalf or even Albus Dumbledore come to mind? However at some point wizards left the realms of fantasy for the computing world, specifically to become tools offering users guidance with things like installation. To find out how this happened, it's probably best to start at the beginning.

The earliest form of the word wizard can be traced back to the Middle English wysard, a combination of wys meaning 'wise' and the suffix -ard, a common formative used in nouns that denote people characterised by a specific action or trait (other examples include bastards, cowards and drunkards). So from around the 1440s a wizard was simply a wise man.

Over the next one hundred years wizards would acquire magic powers and started to be mentioned alongside witches and sorcerers. In a sermon in 1562 Hugh Latimerthe, the bishop of Worcester, said: "Whan we be in trouble, or sicknes, or lose any thing: we runne hither and thither to wyssardes, or sorcerers, whome we call wyse men."

Another century later and wizards were people who were skilled at their profession, so "wizards of histories" were historians, while "wizards who painted" were artists. At some point in the 1920s wizard also started to be used as a slang term for 'excellent or marvellous'. However it was the figurative take on the word that transferred into computing in the 1980s when the Hacker's Dictionary, a jargon.txt file maintained at MIT, described a wizard as a hacker or an expert in computing:

"A person who knows how a complex piece of software or hardware works; someone who can find and fix his bugs in an emergency[...] A person who is permitted to do things forbidden to ordinary people."

The concept of a wizard as tool or user interface to help users install or use software was introduced by Microsoft in 1991. The innovative "Page Wizard" was part of Microsoft Publisher and offered a step-by-step instructional guide that lead users through a series of design options.

The wizard started to crop up in other Microsoft software, assisting with installation, printer setup, internet connection and other things. It was introduced as a new term in the November edition of MacUser magazine in 1992:

"... we'd like you to meet Wizards, step-by-step guides that are designed to walk you through complex tasks."

The wizard was commonplace by the 2000s but today the term is starting to feel old hat and many companies are replacing wizards with assistants instead. Google's is actually called Google Assistant, while other companies have humanized their assistants with names like Alexa (Amazon), Siri (Apple) and Cortana (Microsoft). Sadly it seems the wizards of the 1990s are no longer considered quite so wizard. 

Logs, logins and backlogs

It might sound like an obvious association to make but I doubt many people would connect the terms log files, backlog and login with a chunk of wood despite it being the most likely origin of these words.

To start at the beginning, the root of the word log meaning ‘a bulky mass of wood’ isn't entirely clear. One theory links it to the Swedish låga meaning ‘a fallen tree lying on the ground’ and phonetically it does sound similar. Another theory is that log and the related clog arose from attempts to evoke the sense of something large and heavy. While others have linked it to lug meaning ‘something heavy and clumsy’, from the Dutch word log meaning ‘slow and heavy’. Perhaps I'm barking up the wrong tree but I think there is probably a case for all three.

The opening line of every episode of Star Trek, “Captain’s log, stardate...”, is perhaps the most famous cultural reference that hints at how log might have drifted into the realm of technology. However the answer isn't space travel but rather the sea or to be more specific, sailing.

"Captain's log stardate XXX" was the opening line for every episode of Star Trek.

A captain's log, or simply a log, was a record of observations or readings that started life on the high seas, specifically as an apparatus used to measure the speed of a ship. Sailors would throw a wooden log or board tied to 150 fathom (900 ft) length of rope overboard and would time how long it took to run out.

These daily recordings of their ship’s speed were kept in a log-book, a term which can be traced back to the 1670s. To untangle the root of another word, sailors would also tie knots in the string tied to the log-line and by counting these knots, were able to give the ship a more precise measurement of speed: knots per hour.

An example of a log and line from the National Maritime Museum.

The log-book is the most logical (from the Greek logos meaning 'reason' - not the wooden log!) answer for how log came to mean a record of performance or progress in technology. The verb to log would arise in the 1880s, initially referring to the entry of a man's name into a log-book for some kind of offence. This would later migrate into computing in the 1960s in the form of login, the act involving a user entering their name to access a computer, as well as logging in and logging out.

The original backlog was a large log placed at the back of a fireplace.

The other type of log that relates to a physical wooden log but with a different origin is the term backlog, meaning an accumulation of uncompleted work or matters to be dealt with. The etymological root of this word lies in the fireplace. Simply put, a backlog was the large log placed at the back of the fire that was intended to "smoulder for days" from the 1680s. The term was later used figuratively to mean 'something in reserve, reserves or an accumulation' by the late 1800s before the meaning changing to 'an arrears of unfulfilled orders or uncompleted work' from the 1930s. So that is the reason we have backlogs but no frontlogs, which I'd imagine would be more prone to rolling out and setting fire to your carpet! 🔥