Fark.com's live thread during the Sept. 11 attacks
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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.
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.
I think we had gone from almost no one having phones to the majority of the year having them in the space of that year. A lot of hand me downs from parents, and a fair bit of being envious of kids with Nokias.
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 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...
(For context, this was the rural US southeast, and our family did have disk players, we just kept using tapes for a while. I remember the library had a lot more children videos and audio books on tapes than disks.)
Our family was gifted a CD player in 94 or 95, and all my music that I purchased with my allowance from that point was on CD, even though the unit had 2 tape decks. Mom only bought CDs from that point as well. Then when I got my first car in 01, I installed a radio that was CD only, no tape deck.
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.
https://www.theguardian.com/help/insideguardian/2011/feb/28/... (closure notice)
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.
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.
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:
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 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.
more importantly, making someone aware of their inaccuracy of something so close to them could quite possibly make them feel ashamed, or embarrassed, perhaps even disrespectful. but it’s just how memory works.
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...
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
9/11 also happens to be the anniversary of the coup in Chile which was instigated by the CIA.
Most of South America would likely disagree with calling us the preferable superpower.
A US Citizen thinks the US is the best superpower? color me shocked (I'm also a US Citizen).
A US citizen thinks any of those even has a chance of being preferable to the US? Color me shocked!
What I don't understand is the idea that the EU as a superpower is less plausible than Russia?
I don't think the US would be a superpower if the treaties, tariffs, and military control were parceled out to the individual states and each state governor and state assembly decided when to work as a block and when to act independently.
When asked, Americans are Americans first, then whatever state they come from second.
Europeans are whatever state they come from first, European second.
Most European countries haven’t seen per capita GDP growth since the beginning of the millennium.
They’d rather preserve their “culture” than compete and survive, and it’s starting to show up in the data.
I'm not convinced that much has changed since, and you definitely can't be a super power without an army.
do you have an argument for this claim?
How many countries, when given damn near absolute power, wouldn't have used it to directly conquer?
If you have two evils, you choose the lesser of two evils. If you eliminate the greater of the two evils, all you're left with is evil.
Saying that the country which dropped two atomic bombs on civilian populations is better than a hypothetical in which some other other country dropped more of them, it's... I mean, we're still the only country that ever dropped atomic bombs on civilian populations!
Things are rarely as simple as good and evil. But if you want an argument against certainty, there are many.
You know, simple things like 1) not forcing their own women and children to march into machine gun fire [Japan], 2) not building concentration camps and exterminating whole races [Germany], 3) not building a prison state that people regularly got shot trying to escape [USSR], or 4) a combination of all of those prior “techniques” plus a highly capable surveillance state [China]
Because if they would, then this point isn’t relevant to which is preferable, is it?
edit: the > a
https://reason.com/2014/05/15/be-antigovernment-and-proud/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democide
Democratic, capitalist states commit the least democide.
Of the almost-true scenarios that were available in actual reality, we got a pretty good one with regard to US hegemony.
We have no place telling anyone else in the world how to live or how to govern.
We can’t even educate or provide healthcare to our own.
We’d rather throw people in prison than provide them with the basics required to be successful.
The outlook becomes even worse when you look at our treatment of women and minorities.
Plenty of EU countries there.
Your chart actually illustrates what I was trying to say, which is that some of the largest EU countries, namely Germany, France, and Italy, have been hesitant to act on a larger scale that would possibly put them in the crosshairs of Russian retaliation. France, being the only sovereign nuclear power remaining in the EU, is particularly important. Having its largest countries be more willing to flex military power would let the EU act outside the shadow of the US and be considered a superpower in its own right.
[0] News to me, albeit unsurprising.
It was this book that made me realize the old saying of history repeating itself was not in the sort of vague allegory that I once believed, but in very specific repeated actions in very specific orders - that keep repeating, separated by millennia. In an odd way it offers peace of mind. The world is not headed towards some unprecedented era of chaos. Instead the era we all grew up in (at least within the developed world), one of peace and relative stability, is what was unprecedented.
There aren't many that are always good, or always bad, but it's naive to suggest that "there aren't good guys or bad guys." No matter where in the world you are, you're in no danger of being shot by the Swiss government. That's a statement that's not true of the US, even in the US!
Helluva Pandora’s Box.
No, you really really don't want this. I don't know what utopian partnership of nations you have in mind, but what you will get is World War 1 remastered.
Currently, a large portion of the voting age US citizenry no longer believes in the peaceful transition of power. The highest instance of the US judicial system is under the control of specific authoritarian and religious elements for the foreseeable future. We can't know how the US will evolve next, but the picture doesn't seem really rosy at all. We don't know when the next reality TV star or populist politician will take control there, or which ideological movement will capture the institutions in the next few years. Given the country's history of intervening in other nations, we can only guess at what the consequences would then be for the rest of the world.
Given all of this, having no superpower would seem preferable.
[0]http://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2016/11/18/the-president-and-...
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
I would compare the “oh shit, what does this mean” feeling to how I felt to March 11, 2020, when the NBA announced it was cancelling their season That’s when it became definite to me that the pandemic was real and unavoidable.
In the same way, the future of war for America started to seem unavoidable as one realized the planes were an act of war. Especially when the Pentagon was hit and then later that week when people were getting Anthrax in their mail. That’s something I never hear people talk about, but was just as scary and only added to the chaotic feeling of “wtf is going on?”
The truths of that one are buried under so much official horseshit. Easier to ask now, "who benefited?" and check their subsequent records to see what else they were involved in.
Yes. And I still get a mixed feeling of:
1) "I'm glad I don't live in NYC/USA" and
2) "I wish I was there to help people somehow"
Osama bin Laden declared war on the United States in 1996. He, and Al-Qaeda, had been connected to multiple terrorist attacks throughout the late 90s. The people who had bombed the World Trade Center in 1993 were trained by Al-Qaeda.
This reminds me, I've always been curious that in the year leading up to the attacks, the Taliban was a frequent feature on ABC News. Mostly for their defacing ancient historical sites from what I fuzzily remember.
What I'm trying to say is that there were breadcrumbs in the public arena to make an educated guess the moment the second tower was hit.
ISTR usenet coming into its own, too
Major media was sending out copyright takedowns within hours, often for photos they had no rights to in the first place. Our photo page got "we own this you can't show it" letters from multiple publishers, often on the same photo, several times for photos given to us (as public domain) by the people who took them.
My hero of the day - because I did not have cable, and the major networks were not too wonderful on reporting - was someone at CNN who hacked together a system that spat out the closed captions onto a moderated IRC channel. You could at least stay up with what was happening, scrolling back up to catch more info.
Read a lot of European newspapers as well.
All of them suffered losses (mostly heavy losses) except Ladder 24 which had no losses. Ladders 5 and 20 had devastating losses as did Squad 18.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_emergency_workers_ki...
It was grim and my friend was shaken by the experience for some time.
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.
Get in the car, turn on the radio, and right about then news of the second plane dropped. I knew that was going to be a change across the country right then and there.
Never actually got back to that court case. I think literally every case got an emergency dismissal outright due to that event, as neither myself nor my father ever walked back into the courtroom after that event.
PHP sucked and was notoriously bad for security. And of course there was Flash. The web has had some dark times before.
queue morpheus voice
What if I told you back in my day you could generally find the code by looking at the URL structure before this routing stuff became such a big deal?
imo razor pages hits the right balance. Generally speaking it's auto-routed based upon the URL, but you CAN hook into the routing in the razor page itself for fanciness for those few occasions where you need it.
Everyone always takes a good idea and runs too far with it, but I feel like the routing for razor pages pulls back to reasonableness.
Watching the night sky to the West and seeing NO air traffic was surreal.
Court of public opinion is deadly.
We also managed to make the very idea of conspiracies, false flags and non-government approved opinions... "sketchy"
So cool.
"OK, you guys are now my sole source for info on this - all European traffic goes through mae east and now I can't get squat out of the US.. "
I was at the office and people would call out when they got a news site to load. I clearly recall that cnn.com went to being text-only.
It wasn't a connectivity issue from my memory, it was most major news sites being completely flattened.
"Watch Bush start a fucking war"
Probably one of the comments that aged the worse in the entire internet
The typical occupancy of the buildings was 50k workers and another few tens of thousands were going through it as visitors/tourists [0]. At the time of the attack there were only ~15K inside the buildings. Of those ~2k were killed.
[0] I had a picture of me on the roof two days before the attack.
I almost visited them the week before, but we were running late and didn't have time on that trip.
My Sept 11 experience was not actually realizing anything was really wrong until the afternoon.
I had classes all morning that semester; there were snippets of conversation, a "did you hear" buzz, but nothing really penetrated until I got back to the dorm and found my roommate glued to the TV.
- NIST followed by a peer-reviewed summary in the Journal of Structural Engineering
There's no world in which a burning building not hit by a plane would fall as if it was demolished. Sorry to break the news for you.