The 404 error has an interesting origin story.
In the year of our lord 1980, a group of scientists at CERN in Switzerland began piecing together the thing that would one day be known at the World Wide Web.
Tim Berners Lee was one of these scientists.
That’s a trivia question waiting to happen.
The World Wide Web’s central database was located in the office on the fourth floor of a building, in room 404.
Inside this office, a small group of 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 electronic equivalent of the human shrug.