We watched the South Tower collapse through a paper clip.
A strength of the Internet is its many-to-many design. There is no central hub. September 11 revealed an unexpected weakness. What if millions are trying to access the same node like, for example, the CNN Web site?
One by one, we witnessed all the major news services become overwhelmed with traffic and go dark, flooded with incoming traffic. Today it would be called a denial-of-service attack, if it was intentional. BBC News was the last to go, probably because it took a while for millions of frustrated web surfers to think to check there.
We hauled an old TV, the only one in the building, into the common area. Trouble was, there was no cable service. The low-tech solution was to fashion a large paper clip into a crude little antenna. It was just enough to catch the local TV station, which had by then switched over to the CNN feed.
We stood and watched the tower collapse, though in the moment we could not comprehend what we were seeing. What had caused the gigantic cloud to envelop the building?
Somebody eventually said quietly: "It's gone."
"What? What do you mean, gone?"
"The tower. The tower is gone."