🚀 go-pugleaf

Apropos the 'cookie monster', it might also be worth mentioning that it
was not a 'virus' in any sense of the term.  It was simply a program
which when run put itself into the background as a multi-tasked
addition to your process, and went to sleep.  Every so often it would
wake up and spit a new message to your terminal.  In the Multics
version, the initial sleep period was random, but after the first
message the rest of the sleeps were of fixed length.  As such, in order
to have it bite you, you had to run it from your logged in process.

Typically (on Multics at least) it was used as a gentle way to remind
people not to leave terminals logged in and unattended.  If you found
one such, you'd start up a cookie monster; or, edit the owner's
start_up so that he'd automatically get a cookie monster whenever he
logged in.

When you gave it a cookie (by typing cookie) what you were really doing
was running the program again.  On Multics, external static variables
had a whole-process lifetime, and were shared by all invocations of the
owning command within a process.  (Unlike Unix, your 'process' was, in
essence, your entire login session.  This meant, among other things,
that a program could tell if this was the first time you'd run it in a
process, or if you'd already used it; some programs were chattier on
first run than in later runs.)  The second invocation of cookie would
look at a 'cookie external static variable', and determine that there
was already a copy running.  It would then set a similar variable to
tell the backgrounded version that a cookie had been received and that
it should shut up.  Therefore, it did not even have to attach itself
to monitor your tty input.

-- 
Paul Smee, Computing Service, University of Bristol, Bristol BS8 1UD, UK
 P.S...@bristol.ac.uk - ..!uunet!ukc!bsmail!p.smee - Tel +44 272 303132