Heroes In Another Form

Hard to believe 9/11 was twenty-five years ago. Like most people alive then, I remember exactly where I was: sitting in my little office within the Air Force Research Lab at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. My wife called and said a plane had hit the World Trade Center. I tried to get more information on the CNN website, but at that time even moderate spikes in traffic could take a site down. Needless to say, a lot of people were desperate for information, and the page completely fell apart (as did every other news site). That lack of updates was agonizing, especially once I got a second call about a second plane. We were all sent home shortly thereafter and thankfully then I could get in front of a (standard definition broadcast) television.

Much will be said today about the heroism and villainy on display that day, in a form more eloquent than anything I could write here. But small things are still worth being grateful for, and in this moment I’m thankful for the scores of brilliant people who built the global infrastructure of the Internet and deployed a robust stack of software on top of it such that the days of page overload and information deserts are mostly in the past (for me, at least; I acknowledge there’s still work to be done on this front, but the barriers are no longer technical).

Getting anything to “just work” is incredibly difficult. On the shoulders of giants, indeed.