At the risk of making some people feel old, to me (as a 25 y/old), 2001 feels very long ago, and conjures memories of cassettes and big CRTs.
It's one of my few memories from that far back, actually. The television news, I remember seeing the attacks. Mom was folding laundry, I recall. I wonder sometimes if it's a "fictitious memory", but I think it's real.
Interesting how inverted things are, not even my parents watch TV much anymore, now the normal is getting notifications from whatever social media app.
But that's not quite right though. I think I get the sentiment, but it's not that people in 2001 weren't using socials as much as TV for news because of popularity. It was because they didn't exist yet. That's like saying that in 2001 the ratio of smart phone users to dumb phone/land line users were inverted compared to today, but yet smart phones weren't a thing then so it's not a good inversion comparison.
I have 5 years on you, and as a fifth grader who was in school that morning, it definitely was a few flashbulb memories for me as to the events of the morning and my early return from grade school that day. The rest was much more of a blur, except the next day was absolutely my first realization as a person that “the daily news” doesn’t “reset” to a totally new/different set of topics each day. I truly didn’t understand the scale of that event at the time, and how long it would continue to be newsworthy.
I think some of this is just how one processes notable events at different ages. I have similar childhood memories, which might be tainted by subsequent coverage, of the John Lennon murder and the Ronald Reagan assassination attempt. But I also have similarly vague memories of the hospital where we went to see my grandfather after a stroke when I was <5 years old. There was later family discussion but no visual records to give seed my impressionistic memory of the street and entrance to the hospital.
I was slightly older and have unambiguous memories of Mt. Saint Helens erupting, the Iran Contra hearings, etc. My fourth grade class submitted our teacher's name as a candidate for the Challenger mission, and I was in
middle school when that mission disaster occurred. I was in high school when the Berlin Wall came down, and also high school for the first Gulf War, which was my first taste of endless, wall-to-wall TV coverage. I was waking up for work on the west coast when the 9/11 news came. The post-9/11 coverage was a weird echo of the Challenger disaster coverage (endless replay of explosion and crowd response) and the Gulf War coverage. And, I was just the right age to form a very cynical and jaded attitude towards all this, seeing it as a formulaic media orgy.
Similar to the Fark thread, the breaking news was also followed on other news aggregator and discussion sites like Slashdot. I don't really think the chatter and flood of links to articles or reference to real-time TV broadcasts was that much different than what people do with Twitter and other social media today. Aside from obviously having simpler text and images and less online video content, the difference was only in the percentage of the world population using the tools.
I remember that morning very vividly. My dad was dropping me off at high school and it was my senior year (I didn't own a car). My dad was listening to AM radio as he always did and I wasn't really paying much attention. When the report of it happening came over the radio my dad was just pulling into the parking lot of my high school and he had a shrill in his voice that I hadn't heard before telling me "did you hear that?". It was a really odd feeling. This was the most peaked I had ever seen my father and he dropped me off. It when I got into the cafeteria at school everyone was hunkered around a wood grained TV that was on in the mornings to watch the news. Within an hour the principal came in and waited for a break in coverage to tell us school cancelled for the day and that our parents would be contacted to get us or that we would drive home.
In response, it is kinda odd that this historical event started for me from an AM broadcast and then a wood grained tube tv in a school cafeteria. All of which changed in how feel about them. Even today, hearing AM radio puts me on high alert because the last time I didn't pay attention to it a big event happened.
I have a memory of attending a preschool in somebody's house in 1986, and one day the teacher's son ran into the room saying that the space shuttle Challenger had exploded. The memory is so vivid, but I have no idea if it is accurate at all.
It didn't matter if you did have a cellphone, the network was completely overloaded all day, getting a call through was unlikely.
I remember CNN.com being down for the longest time. I didn't have a television or radio so I ended up following along on the BBC website, which didn't crash. Kudos to the engineers behind that one.
As I recall, bbc.com was built with WebObjects and a heavy layer of static geneation/caching in front of it at that time, and probably served from Solaris or FreeBSD. This seems like the kind of forum where someone would know with certainty however!
> In case there are people here who are really to young to remember this
I'd guess there's quite a few of them here. Most current college age kids hadn't been born yet. College seniors were newborns. Those under age 30 probably remember it, but they were most likely too young to really understand what was going on at the time.
LiveJournal was quite large by then I believe, that along with the real-time messaging apps ICQ/AOL/MSN were beginning to become mainstream. I think I can remember reading about Habbo Hotel too around then.
Probably due to load, most of the big news sites wouldn't load. I ended up going to BBC.com to find out how bad it was. I heard about it from a very confused DJ on a radio station on my way to work.
Most households in the U.S. already had mobile phones by 2001. Market penetration was even higher in Europe. You're right about the smartphone thing, since they didn't really exist until 2002. In 2001 BlackBerry, the most popular smart-thing with its own mobile radio but no phone, had fewer than 200k subscribers world-wide.
I was 15, everyone at school (in the uk) had phones. I remember waiting to be collected from school and reading the latest updates from the BBC WAP website on my Trium Mars phone - that’s a technology that’s long dead.
At your school perhaps. I was slightly younger than you when this happened. I was home from school early for reasons I don't remember, and watched everything unfold on TV (I do remember that part).
I don't remember if I got my first phone before or after this - I think maybe after, but I am honestly very unsure. I can tell you it was a 2nd hand 3310. Not everyone in school had one, because not everyone could afford it. Some people's parents didn't have them; most people's grandparents didn't. Landlines reigned supreme, and MSN whenever that arrived (still had a few friends without internet then, I was on dialup, a few people got broadband the year after).
I don't remember anyone using WAP really ever^. I don't really remember when mobile internet actually took off seriously but I remember a friend posting to facebook and getting updates via SMS in 2008/2009. Cool that you did use WAP, but you were likely a minority and that's nothing compared to the ubiquity of LTE connections of today.
^One of my friend's Dads worked for Vodafone at the time. Their HQ was commutable from where we lived. I discussed C++ with him a lot. I still don't remember anyone using WAP and they had staff discount, so your 12p/10p SMS was 2p for them. I only knew what WAP was because I read about it in PC Pro.
This submission actually unlocked a memory: I wasn't a regular Fark user but because social media and live blogs on news sites weren't a thing yet and TV coverage was lagging behind, I actually followed the Fark thread because it was the closest thing you'd get to a live updated news feed.
The more recent equivalent would be following Twitter hashtags during terrorist attacks (until they became unusable with people actively spreading disinformation).
I remember being told by a friend of my now-ex-wife that "hundreds" of planes had been "taken over" and would be crashed into state legislatures across the USA. It's very difficult to keep a cool head during an overwhelming crisis, and the world trade centre attack drives home how easy it is to get lost in rumour and fantasy.
That time period following the attacks was surreal. People were very scared of any plane noises, and a brown-skinned terrorist was imagined lurking around every corner. Then the anthrax attacks happened, and the DC sniper attacks too. It felt like the USA was paralyzed by fear, so I can at least appreciate the atmosphere that led to the "patriot" act and other rights-eroding laws.
COVID-19 felt like a natural disaster to me, with effects that are bad but not from malicious intent (ignoring the actions of various groups, I mean). The WTC attack and subsequent terrorism felt different, as they were caused by humans to inflict fear and chaos on us. It's amazing to me how different those 2 events felt.
I lived in a small town of less than 20,000 and two days after the attacks, a rock slide fell onto one of our buildings in the city. I remember many freaking out that we were under attack. It's hard for many people to realize how spooked everyone was when such an unprecedented attack took place. No one felt safe for weeks after.
I too recall seeing hysterical news cycles around that time. The reactions to the anthrax scares as mentioned: tons of people at Home Depot buying plastic sheeting and duct tape, etc. And the day of 9/11, I remember multiple people living in other states messaging me about a military target near me being a likely nuke target. Maybe I'm also around anxious people, but it really seemed to me that a certain level of hysterics was pretty widespread around this.
> Quite a few more died in the end than a nuke could manage.
Are you including the ensuing occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq?
Even then, I think you're seriously underestimating the number of casualties a relatively low yield nuke (in the context of modern strategic weapons) would produce if it hit a city like New York.
Yes that was the implication. Depends who you ask and talking about it at the time was full of controversy, but I have seen half a million excess deaths in the end for Iraq and maybe half that for Afghanistan?
I found out about the first plane hitting when my mother called me at work, on a land line I believe, just after I arrived. I fresh out of my BS and worked as a software developer at CMU at the time.
I went into my boss’s office and told
him, and I remember he thought it was a small plane. We had a test server room near our office that had a TV and original XBox. A few of us went into the server room to watch the coverage. Soon after, the second plane hit. I remember asking one of our senior managers if this was bigger than Pearl Harbor. He just looked at me dumbfounded. A while
later the towers fell.
I had a friend who lived in NYC and commuted to Jersey City via the PATH train, so I called him to make sure he was okay. He was. At the time, I didn’t understand that the towers had completely collapsed; I thought they were half standing. My friend from NYC told me I was wrong—-“they’re gone man.”
We continued watching the coverage together for a couple of hours until the University announced that it was closing for the day (I think it closed the rest of the week, but can’t remember). Then we all just shambled home, stunned.
I remember being surprised and a little heartened that the US waited a month the strike back at Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan. By the time we invaded Iraq, I was no longer heartened, but completely disillusioned about the USA as a force for “good” in the world.
I didn't really know what it the WTC looked like, and by the time I had the TV on I just saw the second tower come down. I remember starting Simcity 3000 and placing the World Trade Center to see what is was supposed to look like.
At the time I worked for an ISP which was the primary ISP for most of the major media companies and for the largest consumer internet provider. It was a crazy day trying to keep things flowing under the demand. A lot of traffic engineering and rapidly bringing up additional bandwidth.
All this was done without access to the internet ourselves because early in the day my employer decided to pull the plug on our access. When they pulled the plug many employees went to the cafeteria to watch the TVs there. The company sent security guards to turn off the TVs and confiscate the remotes.
What was the reasoning? Did they not want people to be aware of the news? I'm imagining an exec glued to their TV thinking he has to keep his employees from doing the same thing.
I love that the first instinct is that some country has to be attacked now. Then someone says that they will probably attack some wrong country. Prophetic.
> I love that the first instinct is that some country has to be attacked now
Also somehow end up blaming Palestine and praise Israel out of nowhere
> how much you wanna bet hammas is behind this
> Now I know how Israelis feel when they're bombed by lame suicide Palestines terriost.
> I also got 10 to 1 that the Palestinians are involved somehow.
> Yes, the Palestinians are all cuddly, and the Israelis are the bad guys. The NY Times and the rest of the media better get their heads out of their asses.
Yah, that was my reaction that morning, that the US would bomb the crap out of some random country. (In between trying to figure out what was happing to the inlaws, who were flying in from Ireland at the time)
As someon who was a child at the time, I remember September 11th in the context of fear and the sense of unity it created shortly thereafter. It's interesting to me to go back and look at the way adults reacted, which was mostly anger. It's surprising how calmly the US government reacted compared to normal people. When Afghanistan refused to extradite Bin Laden most of the people I knew wanted to start nuking Afghan cities one by one until they changed their mind.
Readit News
Although 2001 doesn't seem too long ago, most people didn't have cell phones still, and those that did were signor feature phones.
Social media didn't really exist yet, at least not as we understand it today.
Many people had internet speeds that would be unusable today, so most information still came through the TV.
It's one of my few memories from that far back, actually. The television news, I remember seeing the attacks. Mom was folding laundry, I recall. I wonder sometimes if it's a "fictitious memory", but I think it's real.
Interesting how inverted things are, not even my parents watch TV much anymore, now the normal is getting notifications from whatever social media app.
But that's not quite right though. I think I get the sentiment, but it's not that people in 2001 weren't using socials as much as TV for news because of popularity. It was because they didn't exist yet. That's like saying that in 2001 the ratio of smart phone users to dumb phone/land line users were inverted compared to today, but yet smart phones weren't a thing then so it's not a good inversion comparison.
I was slightly older and have unambiguous memories of Mt. Saint Helens erupting, the Iran Contra hearings, etc. My fourth grade class submitted our teacher's name as a candidate for the Challenger mission, and I was in middle school when that mission disaster occurred. I was in high school when the Berlin Wall came down, and also high school for the first Gulf War, which was my first taste of endless, wall-to-wall TV coverage. I was waking up for work on the west coast when the 9/11 news came. The post-9/11 coverage was a weird echo of the Challenger disaster coverage (endless replay of explosion and crowd response) and the Gulf War coverage. And, I was just the right age to form a very cynical and jaded attitude towards all this, seeing it as a formulaic media orgy.
Similar to the Fark thread, the breaking news was also followed on other news aggregator and discussion sites like Slashdot. I don't really think the chatter and flood of links to articles or reference to real-time TV broadcasts was that much different than what people do with Twitter and other social media today. Aside from obviously having simpler text and images and less online video content, the difference was only in the percentage of the world population using the tools.
In response, it is kinda odd that this historical event started for me from an AM broadcast and then a wood grained tube tv in a school cafeteria. All of which changed in how feel about them. Even today, hearing AM radio puts me on high alert because the last time I didn't pay attention to it a big event happened.
I have a memory of attending a preschool in somebody's house in 1986, and one day the teacher's son ran into the room saying that the space shuttle Challenger had exploded. The memory is so vivid, but I have no idea if it is accurate at all.
https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/annual-recorded-music-sales-b...
I remember CNN.com being down for the longest time. I didn't have a television or radio so I ended up following along on the BBC website, which didn't crash. Kudos to the engineers behind that one.
I'd guess there's quite a few of them here. Most current college age kids hadn't been born yet. College seniors were newborns. Those under age 30 probably remember it, but they were most likely too young to really understand what was going on at the time.
https://www.theguardian.com/help/insideguardian/2011/feb/28/... (closure notice)
I don't remember if I got my first phone before or after this - I think maybe after, but I am honestly very unsure. I can tell you it was a 2nd hand 3310. Not everyone in school had one, because not everyone could afford it. Some people's parents didn't have them; most people's grandparents didn't. Landlines reigned supreme, and MSN whenever that arrived (still had a few friends without internet then, I was on dialup, a few people got broadband the year after).
I don't remember anyone using WAP really ever^. I don't really remember when mobile internet actually took off seriously but I remember a friend posting to facebook and getting updates via SMS in 2008/2009. Cool that you did use WAP, but you were likely a minority and that's nothing compared to the ubiquity of LTE connections of today.
^One of my friend's Dads worked for Vodafone at the time. Their HQ was commutable from where we lived. I discussed C++ with him a lot. I still don't remember anyone using WAP and they had staff discount, so your 12p/10p SMS was 2p for them. I only knew what WAP was because I read about it in PC Pro.
Deleted Comment
The more recent equivalent would be following Twitter hashtags during terrorist attacks (until they became unusable with people actively spreading disinformation).
That time period following the attacks was surreal. People were very scared of any plane noises, and a brown-skinned terrorist was imagined lurking around every corner. Then the anthrax attacks happened, and the DC sniper attacks too. It felt like the USA was paralyzed by fear, so I can at least appreciate the atmosphere that led to the "patriot" act and other rights-eroding laws.
COVID-19 felt like a natural disaster to me, with effects that are bad but not from malicious intent (ignoring the actions of various groups, I mean). The WTC attack and subsequent terrorism felt different, as they were caused by humans to inflict fear and chaos on us. It's amazing to me how different those 2 events felt.
Their ISO 9000 works - they're improving. :)
Quite a few more died in the end than a nuke could manage.
This website is quite interesting with footage from major tv networks on the day:
https://911realtime.org/
Are you including the ensuing occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq?
Even then, I think you're seriously underestimating the number of casualties a relatively low yield nuke (in the context of modern strategic weapons) would produce if it hit a city like New York.
Dead Comment
I went into my boss’s office and told him, and I remember he thought it was a small plane. We had a test server room near our office that had a TV and original XBox. A few of us went into the server room to watch the coverage. Soon after, the second plane hit. I remember asking one of our senior managers if this was bigger than Pearl Harbor. He just looked at me dumbfounded. A while later the towers fell.
I had a friend who lived in NYC and commuted to Jersey City via the PATH train, so I called him to make sure he was okay. He was. At the time, I didn’t understand that the towers had completely collapsed; I thought they were half standing. My friend from NYC told me I was wrong—-“they’re gone man.”
We continued watching the coverage together for a couple of hours until the University announced that it was closing for the day (I think it closed the rest of the week, but can’t remember). Then we all just shambled home, stunned.
I remember being surprised and a little heartened that the US waited a month the strike back at Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan. By the time we invaded Iraq, I was no longer heartened, but completely disillusioned about the USA as a force for “good” in the world.
also perhaps it’s not worth nitpicking minutiae over someone’s account of a tragedy.
Deleted Comment
All this was done without access to the internet ourselves because early in the day my employer decided to pull the plug on our access. When they pulled the plug many employees went to the cafeteria to watch the TVs there. The company sent security guards to turn off the TVs and confiscate the remotes.
Also somehow end up blaming Palestine and praise Israel out of nowhere
> how much you wanna bet hammas is behind this
> Now I know how Israelis feel when they're bombed by lame suicide Palestines terriost.
> I also got 10 to 1 that the Palestinians are involved somehow.
> Yes, the Palestinians are all cuddly, and the Israelis are the bad guys. The NY Times and the rest of the media better get their heads out of their asses.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/world/americas/newsid_15370...