404 has a history! 

But Benno had more to say on this:

"Sounds like bullshit, Barry.

Most protocols that use three-digit response codes (SMTP, FTP, HTTP among others) tend to assign the first digit to a class of responses (in the case of HTTP, 1xx is informational, 2xx is successful, 3xx is a redirection, 4xx is a client error and 5xx is a server error, all of which can be found by looking at RFC 2616). So then they just start adding specific responses into those classes, so 400 is "Bad Request",
401 is "Unauthorized" (which is the response that causes your browser to pop up a login dialogue), 402 is "Payment Required", 403 is "Forbidden",
404 is "Not Found" and so on. It's all in the RFC. =)"

Posted at 10:14 AM #

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404 has a history! 

But Benno had more to say on this:

"Sounds like bullshit, Barry.

Most protocols that use three-digit response codes (SMTP, FTP, HTTP among others) tend to assign the first digit to a class of responses (in the case of HTTP, 1xx is informational, 2xx is successful, 3xx is a redirection, 4xx is a client error and 5xx is a server error, all of which can be found by looking at RFC 2616). So then they just start adding specific responses into those classes, so 400 is "Bad Request",
401 is "Unauthorized" (which is the response that causes your browser to pop up a login dialogue), 402 is "Payment Required", 403 is "Forbidden",
404 is "Not Found" and so on. It's all in the RFC. =)"