On 12:34 AM 9/16/02, Kurtis Lindqvist wrote:
Just like the net was one of the prime sources of information during 9-11.
On the morning of 9/11 I was alone in a colo in Reston VA (3000 miles from home), and I found it very difficult to get information (other than the most basic facts, planes hitting WTC and Pentagon, crashing in PA, airplanes grounded, WTC towers collapsing) on that day. Web servers were overloaded, downloads repeatedly stalled. The big thing the 'net helped with most was sending information (via email and IM) to my friends and family back home in CA, letting them know that I was OK, and to receive information (via email and IM) from those watching TV and learn second hand what they had learned from TV. My cell phone only worked intermittently, due to heavy network congestion on the cell network surrounding DC. When I finally got done at the colo and went back to my friend's house in Vienna later that afternoon, *that* is when I was finally able to learn details about what had happened during the day and see video of the WTC etc. - via TV footage. When I got back to the office, I learned that the big screen TV that had previously been located in the exercise room had been moved to the center of the office so that everyone could more easily see it, and everyone could hear it. Meanwhile, they all had high speed Internet connections to the computers sitting on their desks. Why bring in the TV if the 'net was "one of the prime sources of information"? jc