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 realized 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.