In 1997 code 402 was meant as a soda machine for the web: a page costs a few cents and the browser pays by itself. It sat in reserve for almost thirty years.
In January 1997, when engineers were finishing the HTTP/1.1 specification, the language in which a browser talks to a website, they left a response code in it, 402, “payment required”. Everyone knows code 404, which means the page was not found. Code 402 was supposed to mean that the page exists but has to be paid for, and the browser would pay a few cents by itself, as at a soda machine. How to pay was never worked out, and the specification said the code was reserved for future use. It lay in reserve for almost thirty years. Instead of micropayments the internet chose advertising, because people found it too tiresome to decide before every article whether it was worth five cents.
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Money for Machines — Nobody Owns Money | Mike Fluff
