[from the children's TV program Sesame
Street] Any of a family of early (1970s) hacks reported on
TOPS-10, ITS,
Multics, and elsewhere that would lock up either the
victim's terminal (on a timesharing machine) or the
console (on a batch
mainframe), repeatedly demanding I WANT A
COOKIE
. The required responses ranged in complexity from
COOKIE
through HAVE A COOKIE
and upward.
Folklorist Jan Brunvand (see FOAF) has described
these programs as urban legends (implying they probably never existed) but
they existed, all right, in several different versions. See also
wabbit. Interestingly, the term cookie monster appears to be a
retcon; the original term was
cookie bear.