Have you ever wondered why we use the term “Cookies” in ASP ? Well that question didn’t pop up into my mind until one of my students asked me why do we call them like that?

When I checked for the history of cookies, nothing was clear enough about the origin of this name. But looking for some logical terms, I imagined that a cookie to be named as so, it must be similar to the real cookie (i.e. biscuits) the browser leave on client’s computers when browsing any website. But the truth was something else.

Cookies are named after the Chinese fortune cookies!! That was the last thing I would expect!!

If we go back to the history of Fortune Cookies, they are crisp cookies with a fortune wrapped inside. Some says fortune cookies are product of the U.S.A, invented in 1909 by Makota Hagiwara, manager of Golden Gate Park’s Japanese Tea Garden in San Francisco. Others say the origins were laid down by the Chinese 49’ers who worked on the building of the great American railways through the Sierra Nevada into California, these workers used the cookies to exchange secret messages for rebellion.

Whatever was the reason for inventing the fortune cookies, the concept is the same. Cookies contain simple text messages and so do the browser cookies. Cookies are little chunks of text passed from a Web server to a Web browser and back again.

Now the term is clear enough and we can have a logical reason behind this naming, thanks for Andrew Stuart that explained this in his blog (Using cookies in Lotus Domino applications is in your future)