Today I was thinking about how much the world has changed in 23 years, how different the world was on that beautiful Tuesday. Not just about how what happened on that day changed the world, but how it was a reality that would be all but unrecognizable to the generation that has been born and grown up since.
On that September Tuesday, cell phones were still relatively new. The smartest phone you were likely to have was a Blackberry. The internet was still young. I remember my university had only that year transitioned from Telnet to a more modern system for network access around campus.
Televisions were still usually hardwired into a wall to get broadcasts via cable, or had an antenna attached directly to the set. They were still big, boxy things and they weren’t nearly as ubiquitous in public spaces as they were even a few years later.
I remember calling on a land line to check and see if my first class of the day was going to be cancelled or not. The Classics department hadn’t heard—of course they hadn’t. Unless they had a radio on, or someone happened to check a news website (not a common occurrence in those days unless you were of a certain major, to be honest), they wouldn’t have known. There was no TV in the department office. Email was barely in use as a mode of communication between professors and students that day—it was still very new, something that people in academia were still getting used to using. Class cancellations were posted on classroom doors, not emailed out in advance—most of the time.
Classics Department—and my professor—found out what was happening from me.
After that class lasted all of five minutes, I remember going to the dining commons and some of the food service staff and other people who worked in the building had a TV rigged up in a side room, plugged into a jack and the wall so they could watch the footage. Everything was eerie and surreal.
It was a different world.
I didn’t have a cell phone yet, didn’t have my dad’s number memorized, didn’t have most of the family’s numbers memorized. I had a land line and a prepaid calling card. I wasn’t the only one. I spent most of the day on the floor of my friend’s dorm room, most of us uncomfortable with the idea of being alone.
There are some things you don’t forget, but it’s easy to forget how different the world was, how strange—why the video and pictures of the events are much more rare (and remarkable) than they’d be today. Why it took so long for word to spread.
Why the world slowly stopped in inches and measures as the skies empty out and there was nothing but the quiet and a cloudless blue sky on a September Tuesday 23 years ago today.
