I can still remember today, 11 years later. I was just about to walk in late to my English class at Penn State University when I heard that the first tower was hit on 97.9x. At the time Freddie Fabbri (the insignificant significant one) was the DJ (known best for his role in assisting Breaking Benjamin). He was about to break to another song when when he said that he received word that one of the World Trade Center towers was hit. From that point forward, none of us could ever imagine what was about to happen.

Looking back 11 years later, it reminds me of how technology changed as a whole. Disaster Recovery, Virtualization, and being mobile have all taken off. At times, it makes me wonder if this tragic event forced further development into these areas. Groups such as Wall Street West had formed in and around my area.

This was a period of time before smartphones really existed. Rather, it was uncommon to see a “suit” walking around without a Palm Pilot and Blackberry was just 2 years old. There also were no tablets. But, the first iPod was released by Apple later that year. Wikipedia was launched. Napster was closed down. Windows XP was released. The Code Red worm infected machines. And developers were still using Microsoft Visual Studio 6, Microsoft Visual Interdev and Java to build applications. There were no clouds to store data. DLLs were everywhere. And a developer would write JavaScript to select elements by ID by typing document.getElementByID("foo");.

A lot has changed in those 11 years. However, the memories of those that were around on that tragic day have not. To all of those affected by 9/11, our thoughts and prayers are still with you.

WTC