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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
In case you don't wanna have to keep clicking back/forth to go to the next page (the links aren't adjusted to point to the archived pages) there's a video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QHwF5NNAu5w
Then you realize there aren’t good guys or bad guys, there’s just a world of immense trade offs, and that on balance the US is a far preferable superpower than the other probable options.
While the CIA did do some influential things, it seems like most of the damage was caused from within... what the CIA did was tantamount to leaning on the Tower of Pisa until it toppled
it's crazy to think that until the 2nd plane hit, everyone was thinking about _just_ a bad tragedy, and then came the 2nd explosion and the world changed completely.
This looks like an edited thread. I remember on IRC it was nothing but towel wrapping/turbin winder / sand nggr / islam insults after the second one hit.
One of my friends and colleagues had just finished a large, years-long IT consulting project with Marsh. Not long after the towers fell he received a request to join a group of people who had worked closely with some of their IT staff killed in the attack. The task: come up with a dictionary of possible passwords the deceased may have used based on everyone's recollection of their private lives and habits around passwords they may have shared (character substitution habits, etc.)
It was grim and my friend was shaken by the experience for some time.
I found out while on a plane that had just left Hawaii headed for Sydney. I couldn't understand why the flight attendants were walking around with manifests, then talking at length with select passengers. Turns out they had identified those traveling through NYC and wanted to ID those with family there. In the airport 10 hours later saw what I thought were incredibly bad-taste tabloid newspapers headlines. Add in jet lag and it was probably 2 days before I understood what had happened.
So on that day, I was homeless and I woke up on a park bench with the dawn. I went to Mass in the morning where they had the custom of allowing anyone pray for any intention, and so someone mentioned an explosion or bombing in NYC and I didn't think much of it, considering the backdrop of regular terrorist bombings and such.
Then I made my way up to the library and logged onto a public computer in the lab. There was a volunteer at the front desk making many phone calls in an attempt to organize an emergency blood drive, which I thought was notable, but by this time (late morning in Arizona) I didn't really grasp the magnitude of what was going on, until I logged on to a news site or a chat room with my friends and then it all became clear. That afternoon I went to the student lounge at church where the TV was just nonstop replaying footage of the aircraft smashing into buildings. That continuous replay was profoundly traumatic for me and doubtless other people; I do not know why we persisted in viewing it.
[+] [-] hunter-gatherer|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] spijdar|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] samatman|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] Merad|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] implements|3 years ago|reply
https://www.theguardian.com/help/insideguardian/2011/feb/28/... (closure notice)
[+] [-] protomyth|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jeffbee|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] samwillis|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] green-salt|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hnbad|3 years ago|reply
The more recent equivalent would be following Twitter hashtags during terrorist attacks (until they became unusable with people actively spreading disinformation).
[+] [-] bloopernova|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] xeromal|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] IYasha|3 years ago|reply
Their ISO 9000 works - they're improving. :)
[+] [-] P5fRxh5kUvp2th|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Grimburger|3 years ago|reply
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/
[+] [-] nordsieck|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] macksd|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sylens|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TEP_Kim_Il_Sung|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] avidphantasm|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] candiddevmike|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] brnt|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] tssva|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] victor9000|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ImHereToVote|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lm28469|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] wiredfool|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] causality0|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fellellor|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] josu|3 years ago|reply
http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/world/americas/newsid_15370...
[+] [-] agsnu|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] josu|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] smcl|3 years ago|reply
In case you don't wanna have to keep clicking back/forth to go to the next page (the links aren't adjusted to point to the archived pages) there's a video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QHwF5NNAu5w
[+] [-] tanepiper|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hollywood_court|3 years ago|reply
9/11 also happens to be the anniversary of the coup in Chile which was instigated by the CIA.
[+] [-] ethanbond|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pmarreck|3 years ago|reply
While the CIA did do some influential things, it seems like most of the damage was caused from within... what the CIA did was tantamount to leaning on the Tower of Pisa until it toppled
[+] [-] chrischen|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] drawfloat|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] boredemployee|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nirvgorilla|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] xeromal|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] green-salt|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Angostura|3 years ago|reply
ISTR usenet coming into its own, too
[+] [-] curiousgal|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] spanktheuser|3 years ago|reply
It was grim and my friend was shaken by the experience for some time.
[+] [-] skeeter2020|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] runlevel1|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Eleison23|3 years ago|reply
Then I made my way up to the library and logged onto a public computer in the lab. There was a volunteer at the front desk making many phone calls in an attempt to organize an emergency blood drive, which I thought was notable, but by this time (late morning in Arizona) I didn't really grasp the magnitude of what was going on, until I logged on to a news site or a chat room with my friends and then it all became clear. That afternoon I went to the student lounge at church where the TV was just nonstop replaying footage of the aircraft smashing into buildings. That continuous replay was profoundly traumatic for me and doubtless other people; I do not know why we persisted in viewing it.