Twenty years ago
I had an exam. It was a resit exam, second year artificial intelligence module 2Bh. I had done no revision, which was pretty common for me at the time. It was twenty years ago. It was a Tuesday. I was twenty-one years old and in some ways very stupid, not least of which was in my assumption that I could wing this one. The exam was at Adam House, a beautiful old Adamist neoclassical hall on the same street as my lab, and scheduled for 2pm. As I walked across the Meadows I listened to music on my Creative NOMAD Jukebox mp3 player, which had the size and form factor of a Sony Discman.
2pm UK time, when my exam started, is 9am in New York. The first plane hit the North Tower at 08:46.
The rule in exams is: no one leaves the hall in the first thirty minutes. The questions were all on generalized modus ponens and other tedious matters of formal logic. I'd taken a degree in artificial intelligence so that I could build the Terminator and this stuff was all far beneath me. I put in a few perfunctory answers and spent ten minutes watching the clock tick onwards to 09:30.
On the dot of 09:30, as I got up and left the hall with a flourish (I wasn't wearing cloaks then, but it was the early oughts and I had a fabulous swishy leather trenchcoat), I drew behind me a train of five or six other students who'd all been waiting for the same moment.
Met up with Dragal outside the exam hall. He'd been directly behind me during my flounce. (I wonder what he's up to these days?) We went to Starbucks on North Bridge for a chat and some sort of elaborate caramel frappuccino, and then dropped into the machine lab to catch up on email. Going to a specific physical location in order to connect to the internet was a thing in those days.
(For unrelated reasons, mostly to do with my then-burgeoning and now firmly-established anticorporate stance, I've never spent money in a Starbucks since that day.)
Facebook didn't exist then, nor did Dreamwidth, or even Livejournal. But I was on everything2, an early attempt to invent the concept of the wiki that didn't ever really catch on. Logged-in users had a chatbox down in the lower right corner. (HTML frames!) As I surfed the nascent web, I became peripherally aware of comments going by like: As of 10:15 both towers are down
, and I deduced that something might be happening. So I opened a new instance of Netscape Navigator for Solaris and directed it towards a popular news website.
On the way back home across the Meadows I used SMS on my Nokia 8110 (which of course I'd bought because it was the one from THE MATRIX) to text my then-girlfriend* (I wonder what she's doing these days?) and my father. I spoke to my father later on a voice call. The conversation mostly consisted of commentary regarding how much the scenes unfolding at the Pentagon resembled scenes from the current videogame Command & Conquer: Red Alert 2.
I turned the radio on when I got home, and left it on. I slept that night with a torch under my bed, because I didn't own a gun. We had no idea what was going to happen next, and it was what I had, and I didn't know what else to do.
The following day, 12th September 2001, the Telegraph ran an editorial stating that, since the attacks were obviously coordinated on the internet
, the US military must immediately be allowed access to every communication that had crossed it, just in case it might be relevant; also, that any ISP that failed to comply should be immediately targeted by Tomahawk cruise missiles.
Some things haven't changed.
I still have no idea what generalized modus ponens is.
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* Not that one.