As I write this, on the day after the unspeakable events in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania, my wife and I have just returned from a walk along the beach at Emerald Isle. Normally, our annual beach trip is a digital sabbatical for me, a time when I think about computers more than using them. But despite my intentions, technology proved inescapable after the twin towers of the World Trade Center collapsed.

We had brought a laptop to the beach because my wife needed it for a screenplay she is working on. And I had put so many appointments and notes on my Pocket PC that I chose to bring it as well, which meant including its portable keyboard. Unexpectedly, I was surrounded by gadgets. And unlike last year, this time I carried a cellular phone that my son called to give us first word about the attacks.

With the news, I jacked our ThinkPad into the phone line, only to find that the Web sites of major news outlets were all but unreachable. Ottawa-based Webhancer, which measures Web traffic, reports that MSNBC's site went from several hundred users (the norm for a given moment at the site) to 22,000 page requests shortly after the attacks began. Load times (the time it takes to display a Web page on the screen) shot up to levels high enough to force many servers to time out, producing delays and frustration.

Many news sites, such as CNN.com, were forced to completely rearrange their pages, cutting out bandwidth-wasting graphics and advertisements in favor of pure textual information. By the end of the day, the abcNews.com site was almost unrecognizable, with links to major stories set in a page that was reminiscent of the early days of the Web, before Net ads and image overkill had taken off.

In the absence of reliable Web sites, I turned to other Net sources. Unlike the national audiences served by TV channels, online communities tend to be globally based but often rather small. You get to know people by their names or the "handles" they choose to go by, which makes a message board such as Slashdot into a powerful news source when things go wrong. Despite a huge load on its servers, Slashdot began accumulating a storehouse of messages from witnesses and survivors of the catastrophes.

"I ran downtown to be of some use, and made my way deep into the financial district shortly after the second building collapsed ..." wrote one pseudonymous poster. "A few of us volunteered to give blood, and we were put on a bus that led us through the carnage of the area surrounding the towers. Inches of ash and soot. Entire blocks covered in papers, most halfway burnt. Eventually, we were re-routed, and taken to Saint Vincent's medical center to donate, but turned away due to the incredible volume of people willing to donate."

Another poster, called "Sahara," described the scene from the East Village: "Everything is grey and cloudy and there is 5 inches of debris on the ground. It looks like it is snowing. City Hall looks like it is standing in a desert. Police were going up and down the streets yelling into loudspeakers. I'm so used to hearing sirens now, it is like birds chirping. They are concerned now [about] biological weapons so hopefully the wind won't shift and blow smoke my way. Third building just fell."

Mailing lists and message boards are places where hard news mixes with rumor, hence that incorrect suspicion of biological warfare. As the morning progressed, stories of F-16s over major U.S. cities and follow-up attacks on the Capitol and other buildings were rife, but so were links to reputable news sources as further hard information once again became available on the Web. And an outpouring of support welled up from other countries as the day wore on, especially in messages from Australia and New Zealand.

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