"But WHY are they called 'cookies' or is that a stupid question?"

Well, long before UNIX, long before the days of even the thought of PCs, someone wrote a cute little piece of code that ran on multi-user time sharing systems that used paper or video terminals. It would look at a list of the running processes, grab a terminal and send "Gimme Cookie!" - the cry of The Cookie Monster from Sesame Street (which was new at the time).

It would keep popping up more persistently until you typed 'Cookie', and then it would go away for a while.

Such is "Culture", that 'everybody' (involved with 'serious computing') KNEW what a 'cookie' was back then... and so the term was later used for the little token passed back and forth...

I'm not sure if the original RFC given the origin...

:-)