At the risk of making some people feel old, to me (as a 25 y/old), 2001 feels very long ago, and conjures memories of cassettes and big CRTs.

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.

>Interesting how inverted things are,

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.

Social media existed back then it just wasn't called that. It was mainly done over email, IRC and instant messaging software.

I don't really think those things you just listed are truly part of the every day accepted definition of social media.

I have 5 years on you, and as a fifth grader who was in school that morning, it definitely was a few flashbulb memories for me as to the events of the morning and my early return from grade school that day. The rest was much more of a blur, except the next day was absolutely my first realization as a person that “the daily news” doesn’t “reset” to a totally new/different set of topics each day. I truly didn’t understand the scale of that event at the time, and how long it would continue to be newsworthy.

I think some of this is just how one processes notable events at different ages. I have similar childhood memories, which might be tainted by subsequent coverage, of the John Lennon murder and the Ronald Reagan assassination attempt. But I also have similarly vague memories of the hospital where we went to see my grandfather after a stroke when I was <5 years old. There was later family discussion but no visual records to give seed my impressionistic memory of the street and entrance to the hospital.

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.

I remember that morning very vividly. My dad was dropping me off at high school and it was my senior year (I didn't own a car). My dad was listening to AM radio as he always did and I wasn't really paying much attention. When the report of it happening came over the radio my dad was just pulling into the parking lot of my high school and he had a shrill in his voice that I hadn't heard before telling me "did you hear that?". It was a really odd feeling. This was the most peaked I had ever seen my father and he dropped me off. It when I got into the cafeteria at school everyone was hunkered around a wood grained TV that was on in the mornings to watch the news. Within an hour the principal came in and waited for a break in coverage to tell us school cancelled for the day and that our parents would be contacted to get us or that we would drive home.

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.

> "fictitious memory"

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.

Only you can speak to your own memories, but the cassette tape was already good and dead in the market by 2001.

https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/annual-recorded-music-sales-b...

In the new market, perhaps, but we still listened to "books on tape" in our minivan for another ten years. When the library started switching to carrying CDs, we had to use one of those cassette-to-aux adapters plugged into a portable CD player.

Maybe they meant VHS?

My childhood was full of both, actually! My elder sibling is a decade older, and I sort of "inherited" their stuff. It had definitely been replaced at this point for most people, but at least in my family, we kept using tapes (both kinds) way into the 2000s!

(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.)

Interesting! We definitely still had a pile of audio tapes laying around but they belonged to my mom.

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.

Oh no, dear 25 y/o, please don’t intimidate me with your words about yonder years.

It didn't matter if you did have a cellphone, the network was completely overloaded all day, getting a call through was unlikely.

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.

As I recall, bbc.com was built with WebObjects and a heavy layer of static geneation/caching in front of it at that time, and probably served from Solaris or FreeBSD. This seems like the kind of forum where someone would know with certainty however!

Didn't CNN.com switch to a text only mode?

It did. I don’t remember for how long though. But it went text only to keep up with the demand once they had time to make changes.

> In case there are people here who are really to young to remember this

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 don't recall personal social media then (Myspace was 2003) - but there were large global talk boards with tens of thousands of users:

https://www.theguardian.com/help/insideguardian/2011/feb/28/... (closure notice)

LiveJournal was quite large by then I believe, that along with the real-time messaging apps ICQ/AOL/MSN were beginning to become mainstream. I think I can remember reading about Habbo Hotel too around then.

Probably due to load, most of the big news sites wouldn't load. I ended up going to BBC.com to find out how bad it was. I heard about it from a very confused DJ on a radio station on my way to work.

Most households in the U.S. already had mobile phones by 2001. Market penetration was even higher in Europe. You're right about the smartphone thing, since they didn't really exist until 2002. In 2001 BlackBerry, the most popular smart-thing with its own mobile radio but no phone, had fewer than 200k subscribers world-wide.

I was 15, everyone at school (in the uk) had phones. I remember waiting to be collected from school and reading the latest updates from the BBC WAP website on my Trium Mars phone - that’s a technology that’s long dead.

At your school perhaps. I was slightly younger than you when this happened. I was home from school early for reasons I don't remember, and watched everything unfold on TV (I do remember that part).

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.

Yes, I was a massive geek, I suspect I was the only kid using WAP at school…

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.

AOL Instant Messenger was how I was able to contact a friend in NY at the time.

This submission actually unlocked a memory: I wasn't a regular Fark user but because social media and live blogs on news sites weren't a thing yet and TV coverage was lagging behind, I actually followed the Fark thread because it was the closest thing you'd get to a live updated news feed.

The more recent equivalent would be following Twitter hashtags during terrorist attacks (until they became unusable with people actively spreading disinformation).