The Original Cookie Monster
> OK, here's another one I heard about. This one (I was told) happened > at MIT, back in the 70s (oooooeeeee-ooooo), on some big network type > machine. At the same time every day, a message would appear on > people's terminals, saying "Give me a cookie". And if they did > nothing, the machine would burp and kill their process or something. > Eventually someone, in response to that message, typed "cookie", and > the machine said "thanks" and continued working normally. For the > remainder of the machine's lifetime, people would type "cookie" at the > same time every day and take it for granted that they had to do this. > > While the machine was being dismantled, someone took a look inside and > found this circuit board hooked into the machine. Guess what was > asking for cookies, and had not been found, even after people searched > high and low through the software for the cookie monster... > > So -- did this really happen, or are all of Seymour Papert's students > on drugs? :-) This is a highly exaggerated account of the "Cookie Bear" program. I know all about it because I was there. The author of Cookie Bear is now a highly respected Computer Scientist; I will refrain from mentioning his name here as he and I continue to do business together. On I.T.S., when you received a "send" message it would begin with "MESSAGE FROM" followed by the user name and job name. So you would log in as user COOKIE and load the program into job name BEAR. The user would get progressively more demanding and obnoxious messages every few seconds, ending with "OK, keep your crummy old cookies, you meanie!" or some similar text. It is rumored that there was a version which you could respond to it with a "send" message with the text "COOKIE", but I never saw it. There was a variant of it called SUSAN. During the Ford Administration, Susan Ford had her high school prom at the White House, but she didn't have a date... So, the SUSAN program would be a MESSAGE FROM SUSAN FORD demanding a date. Later on you could assemble Cookie Bear to be anything, demanding anything, as an assembly-time option. At Stevens Tech, a chap named John Potochnak (sp?) developed a TOPS-10 version of Cookie Bear. This version required JACCT or [1,2] privileges (if you know what that means) and used the ATTACH UUO to put itself on the victim's terminal and output the message. He later wrote an improved version called TSCB (Time Sharing Cookie Bear) which could bother multiple users simultaneously with full wildcards, and had features such as "bother users running program X", etc. It could masquerade as any other program, including setting its memory size to appear to the operator (trying to locate and kill it) as an editor, compiler, etc. It also had the feature of being able to take devices (e.g. DECtapes, remember those?) from other users -- the IWANT command... The general obnoxious program for the privileged user at a nerdly college... I wrote a simple version of Cookie Bear for TOPS-20. This was not a particularly great accomplishment, I think it was 10 lines long not including the texts. But certain individuals thought it was great. - Mark Crispin