I am a night owl. Tonight is no exception: it’s late at night, or rather, early morning, September 11, 2026.
On September 11, 2001, I was up all night, working. Here’s an image of my workstation (complete with Marzipan the cat) as it was a year earlier, in 2000; it looked pretty much the same in 2001.
Not readily evident but one of the windows on my workstation screen was live television, courtesy of an ATI All-in-Wonder video+tuner card in my computer. Often, while I worked, I had the television running in the background, either CNN or CBC Newsworld.
That overnight session on the night of September 10/11 2001 was unusually long: It was almost 9 AM when I finally decided that sleep was called for. Just as I was about to head to the bedroom, however, there was this strange announcement on CBC Newsworld: An airplane hit one of the World Trade Center towers in NYC. Details were sketchy.
The WTC was always my favorite destination when visiting NYC; looking at that great city from the 110th floor was an experience. So I was concerned. I knew, of course, of the famous B-25 crash into the Empire State Building all the way back in 1945, so I was not terribly worried: skyscrapers are incredibly tough things.
Still, I switched over to CNN, in the hope that they’d have something more concrete. They were showing the damage to the first tower and then, seconds later, an airplane appears in the video frame… and crashes into the other tower (hidden behind the first from CNN’s viewing angle.)
But it looked so small! My first thought: Surely, a news crew flying recklessly close, or something of the sort. Then, as I was looking at the erupting fireball, I reminded myself of just how big those towers were. That was no Cessna. It was a large airplane.
That’s when it hit me: the world just changed.
I never got to sleep that day, except for brief naps in my chair. I was glued to my computer screen for many more hours, watching the towers collapse, even as I was on the phone with my friend David, talking from his office in Manhattan, watching the same thing with his naked eye. I was watching the tens of thousands fleeing Manhattan Island, my friend and his wife among them. I kept an eye on David’s servers, faithfully chugging along with a live Internet connection in their hastily abandoned office. It was several days before they were allowed to return to downtown Manhattan.
It’s all history now. A quarter century feels a tad compressed when you lived through it, but I remember how long it felt when I was in my teens or early twenties. World War II was a quarter century prior when I entered the second grade in 1970. The Hungarian revolution happened a quarter century prior when I was conscripted. All ancient history. So I suppose 9/11 is ancient history to many. And yet, it shaped our present, a marker, another milestone in the slow process that is unraveling our post-WW2 rules-based world order, taking us back in far too many ways to the dog-eat-dog world of the 19th or early 20th century.
I remember the day and the news vividly, though I wasn’t able to watch it on TV. It was sunny afternoon here, or more exactly in Wyborg – there I was drafted for army service in frontier troops. It so happened that after some initial months I got to headquarters as a “computer specialist” – to work on various dull documents (what military people do when there are no active events – they are producing kilotons of papers – plans, reports, maps, telegrams). One of the officers of our department suddenly entered and grabbed one of the five phones – that which allowed to call to their living quarters – he called his wife and in an alarmed tone said ‘turn on TV, here are the news, they bombed those towers – you remember those towers? I well remember, they were so magnificent, oh…” – well, he simply repeated this several times.
I hardly knew what those towers are etc, but later there were enough and enough speculations by and by – and this officer shared to me that he previously spent several years in US in our embassy guard (this is also duty of our frontier troops as I learnt).
It was the time still without wide internet (moreover in “half-secret” organization) and even access to radio and TV was limited for me by circumstances of the service. So I was less impressed than by invasion in Iraq later or invasion in Yugoslavia few years before. News evolved somewhat slowly. Here were speculations about specific aircraft number which if spelled backwards and changed to certain font in windows will give secret message in pictograms etc…
But definitely it was a kind of milestone in history – perhaps looking back we one day may judge it was a kind of “turning point”. Last decades of XX centurly looked a kind of golden age in US. Now it seems this is long in the past. When had this golden age ended? Perhaps not exactly at 9/11/2001 but definitely it is a quite memorable mark…
Thanks for that reminder! 25 years, so strange to think… It’s still like almost yesterday…
P.S. the picture is very nice. I feel nostalgic to those CRT monitors – such a warm bed for cats! And Marzipan is so unusual and impressive name :)
If you are asking me (well, it seems you are) I think the beginning of the end of the recent “golden age” of the US began in the mid-1990s, when Newt Gingrich’s “Contract with America” program reduced American politics to “beat the opposition party at all costs.” Previously, bipartisan concensus was possible; e.g., Nixon had to resign when it became clear that he lost the trust of his own party, and his own party were willing to put nation ahead of election. But from the 1990s onward, constitutional mechanisms like impeachment became weaponized. What we see today is a direct result of that I think and the 30-year process that followed… and of course the irony is that as a result, America’s global influence (not to mention reputation) is diminishing rapidly, along with the — imperfect, but still — rules-based world of “Pax Americana” that characterized the past 81 years.