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Comment by phaedrus | Hacker News Reader

I was in USMC boot camp on 9/11/2001. You don't get much chance to consume media during training, and they put us on lock down and gave us only limited information. We knew kind of serious attack had happened, but not exactly what.

By the time I got out of training, the news cycle had moved on so it wasn't until the first anniversary of 9/11 that I saw the news footage of the event for the first time.

Coincidentally I ended up stationed in Washington, D.C. and from my barracks I could see the construction cranes working on the damage to the Pentagon.

So it's this weird combination of feeling connected since I was in the military when it happened and then lived near one of the sites, but I also missed a lot. This site could help me see some of the experience I missed.

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> By the time I got out of training, the news cycle had moved on so it wasn't until the first anniversary of 9/11 that I saw the news footage of the event for the first time.

This might seem strange to some younger readers, but remember in 01-02 internet video (and, indeed, internet faster than dial-up) was not ubiquitous. My family has a VHS tape recording of the news that day because that was how the average person preserved TV broadcasts.

> This might seem strange to some younger readers, but remember in 01-02 internet video (and, indeed, internet faster than dial-up) was not ubiquitous.

And even if you used internet video (or, heck, even read news online), none of the sources (origins sites and Google and other portals) had the capacity to deal well with the major surge of associated with a event like 9/11. Everything online was spotty or broken under load. 9/11 broke the internet before “breaking the internet” was a thing, and more literally than almost anything since.

I remember getting dismissed from school early and going to a friends house and trying to find news. The only site we could find that was actually responding was Slashdot, which went to text-only for the day and a few days following.

Edit: the metafilter thread gives a horrific moment-by-moment update stream if that's something you want to read: https://www.metafilter.com/10034/Plane-crashes-in-to-the-wor...

All news sites were down, I remember thinking it was before dawn for Australians, so I tried one of their news sites, and it worked...

Wow. thanks for sharing.

"This is going to be a big turning point in the history and character of this country, I think." posted by Doug at 6:51 AM on September 11, 2001

Doug was more right than he could have known.

I recall that even slashdot got slashdotted, which was itself incredible. The admins there at least had the sense to put up a static page with info about the attacks, which is where I first got some details about it after a fellow student in my theory of computation class first notified me (I think he had a pocket radio he was listening to in class).

For those too young to know, being slashdotted was a term for your website going offline due to too much traffic, named for (and primarily used on) the site slashdot.com. Slashdot was the preeminent popular tech/nerd discussion forum of the time, and being linked from a story on slashdot would often direct more attention to your server than it could handle.

> For those too young to know, being slashdotted was a term for your website going offline due to too much traffic, named for (and primarily used on) the site slashdot.com

A current term for the same thing is the “HN hug of death”, as HN can drive the kind of effect slashdot used to (in part because it has become the new center of gravity for some of the kinds of discussions that used to drive traffic from Slashdot.)

Sarah Kendzior (and most likely other journalists from that time) mentions this in her book Hiding in Plain Sight: 9/11 changed the news, it shifted from print to the web because the web could update faster. Newspapers websites were no longer outdated copies of the print.

Of course that brought about a whole lot of other consequences.

I don't remember which news site, but one of the major ones had to go to a basic text-only format for several hours.

It was CNN. Around 9:45 am it was slow, by 11 am it was down / text only.

i think it was CNN that did that.

i have a memory of trying to find out what was really happening sitting in one of my college's library's after an early morning class and trying to get anything to even respond, much less load. for some reason i remember 'relief' when i finally saw the CNN logo.

All of the majors stripped down to the basics, IIRC. At least the ones I visited.

Fark and Metafilter held up, but they were text to begin with.

Internet video was interesting that day. Couldn't get any from the major sites because they were hammered. But I remember links would get passed along to some Quicktime clips on personal sites. No cell phone cameras, but small camcorders + Macs with firewire were popular enough that personal footage appeared quickly.

We were using robots.cnn.com to get any news. Our work didn’t think it was worth stopping to go home or grieve or anything. Tech jobs.

> This might seem strange to some younger readers, but remember in 01-02 internet video (and, indeed, internet faster than dial-up) was not ubiquitous. My family has a VHS tape recording of the news that day because that was how the average person preserved TV broadcasts.

TiVo was also pretty common, but as I recall I just watched on our TV.

Using the Internet for video in 2001 wasn't something anyone would even momentarily consider as realistic.

I've been watching some broadcasts with RealPlayer, while following the events on IRC. Our national TV did not wake up to the events until maybe 5 hours later.

Heh, funny how fast things changed. In a 2001 episode of South Park, they mock Token for bringing a movie on DVD, assuming their family was rich enough to have a DVD player [1].

But I watched the episode on DVD in 2006, when everyone had one, and so it aged like milk.

[1] https://southpark.fandom.com/wiki/Here_Comes_the_Neighborhoo...

I had a similar experience. I was in the Army and had just completed a 24 hour duty at about the same time the first tower was hit. I was finally about to get some sleep when there was a pounding on my barracks room door. I spent the next 24 hours on guard duty. Quite a long day. Consequently I completely missed all the live coverage and have only ever seen news blips.

Prior to 9/11, one could freely drive on and off of Fort Benning. There were no security checkpoints whatsoever, which is unimaginable these days on a major military installation.

On 9/11 we first had to secure our unit's compound and then eventually fanned out to lock down the roads on and off of post. We had rotating duty manning makeshift entry control points in the weeks and months that followed until permanent ones could be built and a (civilian) force could be stood up to take over the duty. Thousands of soldiers and civilians commuted daily between work on post and local off-post residential areas. It was quite a mess with extensive traffic and delays in the early post 9/11 days.

You may find that watching the retrospective footage will make you want to sign up for the Marines.

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