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Comment by swozey | Hacker News Reader

This stuff is so difficult for me to watch again, I was a senior in HS.

Reading IRC logs from back then is also really interesting. And Nanog had a really interesting slideshow/powerpoint deep dive on the infrastructure outages that occurred. And of course the SomethingAwful thread that's been posted before. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7990991

RE: this specific site.. interesting UX/UI choice. I was hoping I could click the times in Timeline of Events and be sent straight there but it seems like I have to put times specifically in the Controls section. Anyway, this is neat.

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I always thought the leaked pages from 9/11 were an interesting way of viewing the timeline. Starts with a lot of business messages, some sexting, and some automated IT messages.[1]

The at 8:46 you see the first sign of something wrong, a smattering of errors about how the Cantor Fitzgerald API was down, and the butterfly effect the outage had on other systems. The computers were chatting about how something was wrong ahead of any people.

[1] https://911.wikileaks.org/files/messages_2001_09_11-08_45_20...

I was a sophomore in college, it was strange because people didn't have smart phones and many people didn't have cell phones. I remember class starting and a student said, very calmly after receiving a text message about, "oh, that's weird it says an airplane in the world trade center". We all assumed it was just a small private Cessna plane that must of accidentally bumped into the one of the towers, and then class began as usual.

My roommates and I spend the next week completely glued to the television. Which is why this interface is particularly great for capturing that feeling, but it is tough to rewatch.

I was in the Army on a training exercise in Louisiana preparing to go to Kosovo. We were in a flight unit (helicopters) and loading up a convoy to the airfield. We got the call over the radio about it and thought, at first, that is was part of the training exercise. We get to the airfield, setup comms, and get chatter about it not being an exercise. Since they grounded the birds pretty much all week we basically stayed glued to the tv in the hangar for the duration.

It was an odd time since we were technically in peace time and suddenly thrown into this situation. A year later (Mar. '03) we were watching jets fly over Iraq on tv while we preparing for a funeral detail for one of our Blackhawk pilots.

Still hard to believe it's now so long ago.

I was 6months from MEPS. My Major dad told me to GTFO. I'd planned on going Army my entire life. That threw a real wrench in my plans. Thankfully I was able to get out of it since I hadn't signed at MEPs yet.

I lived in Norfolk VA and IIRC we had 3-5 carriers moored. They all dispersed away from the shipyard when it happened. 20-25k Navy just vanished from town.

Do you have a source for the Nanog powerpoint? That sounds really interesting.

I've dug this up 2-3 times since 2001 and I always have a nightmare of a time finding it. I'm not finding it anywhere right now. I'm pretty sure it was a Nanog report but I could be wrong there, it was very thorough and a lot of slides.

Best I can do right now is the Nanog mail list that day/week... https://archive.nanog.org/mailinglist/mailarchives/old_archi...

I relate: was also a senior. I had an English final that morning, I think. Earth shifted. It was an overwhelming experience seeing it happen on TV.

I was a junior. I went to a boarding school and one of those weird memories that sticks with you is that I was unsure whether or not to go to my classes. No cell phones and pretty primitive email system, so it just wasn't clear. I went to one at like 9:30 (central time) and nobody was there, so that was when I realized "oh this is one of those nothing-is-normal-now things".

I was a senior. I grew up on the west coast, never been to New York, but my English teacher was from New York. She knew she'd lost friends that day, but not which ones. She held it together, but it really added a personal connection to what would have just been a horrifically impactful event on TV.

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