When my college roommate woke me up the morning of Sept. 11, 2001 and told me jets had hit the twin towers, it happened to be the first year of my life that I did not have a TV in the home. We had internet and a big 19" CRT monitor, but that was it. To see what was going on, I dragged myself to the McDonald's that was within walking distance, sat down with my breakfast and watched footage of mayhem on the mounted TV. That's an odd little nook in technological history - being beyond traditional television, but the internet was still 1.0 without streaming video (or maybe just our speed wasn't fast enough).
The internet was still new enough that pretty much all major news sites reverted to a stripped down static page that day as they could not keep up with the load.
During the morning and afternoon though, I remember at certain points the NYTimes just having a headline, a picture of the airplane about to hit the second tower, and text and that's it.
Why is that interesting? The Taliban would not have reached the heights they reached without the US. They were instrumental in fighting the Soviets during the Cold War
There was streaming video -- but not that day, largely. The big US news web sites were struggling to serve up even basic HTML, never mind a stream of any kind.
I was stuck at work and wound up watching the whole thing via a RealPlayer stream from the BBC with a 4x3 inch video.
Someone at CNN spat their closed caption feed into an IRC channel. I didn't have cable at the time, so I had my TV on one of the local channels and my dialup connection with mIRC reading that.
