the Web on 9/11

i'd like to take a moment to talk about who and what we were, and the way the World Wide Web was twenty-five years ago. on a day now simply referred to as "nine eleven" (an Americanised date format that means "the 11th of September.")

part one

this first section is written entirely from my vague memories of the day, which means it might not contain any a lot of accurate or verified information. in later sections i might do a bit more research.

where were you?

i was a young website developer based in England, and i had just come back from my lunch break. in my country it was early-afternoon on Tuesday.

our boss' wife had a little side-office, off the side of the office-office, from which she emerged into the main office, and said:

Holy shit! Apparently a plane has crashed INTO the World Trade Center!

she had heard it on the radio. we didn't have a TV in the office.

all around the room there were mutters of "that's in New York, yeah?" and "oh shit, hope everyone's ok", and then: "tap, tap, tap, tap, click"

we all went back to work.

presently, the bosswife re-entered and uttered:

"What the actual fuck? They just said another plane hit!"

"tap, tap, tap, tap, click"

we all went online at the same time.

there was no Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok, none of them. so where did we go? (most people hadn't even discovered Google at this point.) i always got my news from the BBC but, at that moment, the BBC News web site had gone offline· along with the Guardian, the Times, CNN. what the fuck? so much interweb traffic that not even the BBC can operate? no one ever expected a web site to be hit like that, all at once. the crashes weren't just in the skies of Manhattan.

before social media we had online forums like metafilter, slashdot & filepile. we had email and ICQ to reach out to our friends (Katy is fine, she was at home in NC.) we had our independent web sites. we had bloggers, not surprisingly many of them in New York itself. i remember Jeffrey Zeldman took his already-legendary main blog offline, replaced with a message urging anyone who possibly could to go out and give blood. (thanks, but there aren't enough bags...)

in our little web design office, our mate "conspiracy" Mark started telling us all that the Trade Center crashes were "obviously" the result of hackers targetting GPS satellites. it sounded plausible, but we didn't really know. no one knew (and to be fair, this was like two years after The Matrix came out, so anything seemed possible.) and they were reporting more planes missing.

potus George W Bush made a brief statement from that primary school in Florida, calling the event

"an apparent terrorist attack on our country."

terrorism? hijackers? bin Laden? the PENTAGON? what does any of this mean, and when will it stop? is it just America? are we safe on our little island?

and then the twin towers collapsed into heaps of fire and twisted metal.

gradually the beeb managed to cobble together a low(er)-bandwidth version of their page and we were occasionally able to get through (i'm pretty sure ive got a screengrab of this, i'll have a look)

i arrived home and watched the news:

"...but these were no accidents."

it's confirmed, then: someone has openly attacked the USA.

i met with some American friends who lived in our little English town, a million miles away from New York and in shock. the footage keeps repeating: the World Trade Center is gone. we don't know how many people have been killed, but it's a lot. thousands. airline passengers, office workers, and firefighters.

the victims didn't actually need all of that donated blood because the people who didn't die in the initial fireballs were crushed instantly as the towers fell. a few others had jumped in vain from unimaginably high windows, their bodies smashed on the streets below.

it was the evening of Tuesday, 11th September 2001. nine eleven.

New York City burned, shrouded in dust, broken glass, and horror. i was twenty-one years old when the world changed.

work in progress

links

• 11 September - Jeffrey Zeldman
• Remarks by the President After Two Planes Crash Into World Trade Center White House archive