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Why is it called a "404" error anyway?

Tim Berners-Lee in front of an early computer
Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web

There's a myth out there that the code referred to the number of a server room that housed the web’s first servers, back in the 1980's, at CERN (the European Organization for Nuclear Research, in Switzerland).

WIRED magazine interviewed  Robert Cailliau on the subject.  He's a pioneer, along with Tim Berners-Lee, of the hypertext structure that led to the web.

"Error codes were a necessity but not a center-stage concern. "When you write code for a new system, you don’t waste too much time writing long messages for the situations in which you detect an error,"  Memory was, at the time, also an issue; longer messages were impractical. ('Modern geeks have no longer any idea what it was like to program with 64k of memory,' Caillau wrote.)

The solution was straightforward: designate numerical ranges for error categories. This was done, in Cailliau’s telling, "according to the whims of the programmer.” Client errors fell into the 400 range, making "404" a relatively arbitrary assignation for "not found." Cailliau was adamant: "404 was never linked to any room or any physical place at CERN," he wrote. "That’s a complete myth."

Anna Wiener,  Page Not Found: A Brief History of the 404 Error magazine, WIRED magazine Dec. 4, 2017

 

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