404 Not Found


Year 404 was a leap year starting on Friday of the Julian calendar. At the time, it was known as the Year of the Consulship of Honorius and Aristaenetus (or, less frequently, year 1157 Ab urbe condita ). The denomination 404 for this year has been used since the early medieval period, when the Anno Domini calendar era became the prevalent method in Europe for naming years.

Myth


As legend has it, the origin of the error message has a very interesting story dating all the way back to the 1980s when a group of scientists at CERN (Switzerland) started working on what would become the World Wide Web.  In order to achieve this goal, the scientists worked to create a database infrastructure that offered open access to data in various formats.

The World Wide Web’s central database was located in the office on the fourth floor of a building — room 404 to be exact.  Inside the office, two or three people were tasked with manually locating requested files and transferring them over the network to the person who made the request.  But not all requests could be fulfilled, because of problems such as people entering the wrong file name.  When these problems became more common, the people that made the faulty request were met with a standard message: “Room 404: file not found”.

The technology would eventually allow the manual processes to become automated, but the error message adopted to be the HTTP standard response code would keep the room number.