Room 404 offers a history of the origins of Error 404, the "not found" error you get when you try to access a non-existent web page. According to the Room 404, the error number relates to the office at CERN that housed the first, tesing versions of the database that eventually became the WWW.
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'.
Not sure if this is true story or not, but interesting nonetheless.
[via xBlog: The visual thinking weblog | XPLANE]
Posted by johndanseven at December 3, 2005 12:01 PM