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1979 B. W. Kernighan & M. D. McIlroy UNIX Time-sharing Syst.: UNIX Programmer's Man. (Bell Telephone Lab.) (ed. 7) I. iii FSEEK (3S)... Ftell returns the current value of the offset relative to the beginning of the file associated with the named stream. It is measured in bytes on UNIX; on some other systems it is a magic cookie, and the only foolproof way to obtain an offset for fseek.

1984 PC Tech Jrnl. Sept. 51/3 To control the video attributes on its screens, TeleVideo uses what have been dubbed ‘magic cookies’ in display memory. No, these are not brownies laced with a controlled substance, — they are bytes of display memory that hold special codes to set video attributes. These attributes have effect from the time they are first set until they are cleared.

1992 UNIX Rev. (Nexis) Apr. 67 Type a magic cookie (such as ‘g=dcOO/6’) to get into the PROM setup code for the disk controller card.

1997 Internet Mag. Jan. 115/3 The much-loved X window System from MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) had a security mechanism based around magic cookies—tokens exchanged between X clients and servers.