404 page not found/

HTTP/1.0 Room 404 Object Not Found

The history of 404

Before the beginning of time, when the Internet was still very much
under the spell of bare Unix shells and Gopher, before SLIP or PPP
became widely used, an ambitious group of young scientists at CERN
(Switzerland) started working on what was to become the media
revolution of the nineties: the World Wide Web, later to be known as
WWW, or simply 'the Web'. Their aim: to create a database
infrastructure that offered open access to data in various formats:
multi-media. The ultimate goal was clearly to create a protocol that
would combine text and pictures and present it as one document, and
allow linking to other such documents: hypertext.

Because these bright young minds were reluctant to reveal their
progress (and setbacks) to the world, they started developing their
protocol in a closed environment: CERN's internal network. Many hours
were spend on what later became the world-wide standard for multimedia
documents. Using the physical lay-out of CERN's network and buildings
as a metaphor for the 'real world' they situated different functions of
the protocol in different offices within CERN.

In an office on the fourth floor (room 404), they placed the World Wide
Web's central database: any request for a file was routed to that
office, where two or three people would manually locate the requested
files and transfer them, over the network, to the person who made that
request.

When the database started to grow, and the people at CERN realised that
they were able to retrieve documents other than their own
research-papers, not only the number of requests grew, but also the
number of requests that could not be fulfilled, usually because the
person who requested a file typed in the wrong name for that file. Soon
these faulty requests were answered with a standard message: 'Room 404:
file not found'.

Later, when these processes were automated and people could directly
query the database, the messageID's for error messages remained linked
to the physical location the process took place: '404: file not
found'.

The room numbers remained in the error codes in the official release of
HTTP (Hyper Text Transfer Protocol) when the Web left CERN to conquer
the world, and are still displayed when a browser makes a faulty
request to a Web server. In memory of the heroic boys and girls that
worked deep into the night for all those months, in those small and hot
offices at CERN, Room 404 is preserved as a 'place on the Web'. None of
the other rooms are still used for the Web. Room 404 is the only and
true monument to the beginning of the Web, a tribute to a place in the
past, where the future was shaped.