Twenty-five years.

That is somehow both an enormous amount of time and almost no time at all.

On September 11, 2001, I was 25 years old and working for Hogan & Hartson in Washington, D.C. I had only been there a few months. I was a young technologist working in the middle of one of the most powerful cities in the world, surrounded by law firms, government buildings, politicians, lawyers, lobbyists, tourists, federal workers and the constant controlled chaos that is Washington.

Then, one morning, the control disappeared.

September 11, 2001 did not feel like history while it was happening. It felt like the world had come loose.

People today have to remember that communications in 2001 were very different. There was no Twitter. No Facebook. No iPhone. No endless stream of push notifications telling you what was happening every thirty seconds.

The Internet existed, obviously, but when millions of people suddenly tried to hit the same handful of news websites at the same time, things broke.

And things broke.

I remember first getting pieces of information through AIM and other online sources while the major news sites were overloaded or unreachable. Eventually I was able to get to the St. Petersburg Times website and started piecing together what was actually happening.

A plane had hit the World Trade Center.

Then another.

Then came the Pentagon.

That was different for us.

New York was hundreds of miles away. The Pentagon was right there.

Washington started emptying.

There are moments from that day that remain strangely clear even after twenty-five years. The confusion. The rumors. People trying to figure out whether there were more planes coming. Whether other buildings were targets. Whether Washington itself was still under attack.

Nobody really knew.

From downtown you could see the consequences unfolding toward the Pentagon. Eventually public transportation shut down and getting out of Washington became its own problem.

A friend and coworker, Scott, and I ended up walking out of the city.

We crossed the 14th Street Bridge into Virginia.

That sentence sounds almost mundane now. People walk bridges all the time.

But on that day we were walking away from Washington while the Pentagon was burning nearby.

There was smoke in the sky. Emergency vehicles everywhere. Military activity. Thousands of people trying to get somewhere, anywhere, because the normal mechanisms for moving a city full of people had suddenly stopped functioning.

We eventually made it to Scott's apartment in Crystal City.

That was where I finally watched television coverage of the towers coming down.

There is something surreal about seeing an event on television that is simultaneously happening around you. New York was on the screen. The Pentagon was only a short distance away. Washington was locked down. Phones were overloaded or simply not working.

I had been an amateur radio operator for years by then. My callsign was N8CIA, the same callsign I still use today.

And on September 11, ham radio suddenly wasn't just a hobby.

When conventional communications were unreliable, I could still get on the radio and communicate outside Washington.

That has always stuck with me.

We spend our lives building incredibly sophisticated systems and assuming they will always work. Telecommunications networks. Transportation systems. Governments. Financial systems. The Internet. Power grids.

Most of the time they do.

Until something happens that nobody designed them to handle.

Entropy has a way of reminding us that stability is temporary.

Eventually I made my way farther south using the VRE out toward Woodbridge. Later that day, near sunset, I remember seeing Air Force One flying low with fighter aircraft escorting it as President Bush returned to Washington.

I can still picture it.

By that point the entire day had become almost unreal.

That morning I had gone to work.

By evening, thousands of people were dead, two of the tallest buildings in America were gone, part of the Pentagon was destroyed, another aircraft had crashed into a field in Pennsylvania, American airspace had been emptied, military aircraft were patrolling Washington, and the country I woke up in that morning no longer existed in quite the same way.

In the days afterward, like everyone else, we tried to figure out what we could do.

My answer was technology.

I came up with the idea of building an internal 9/11 disaster relief donation system for Hogan & Hartson. I built it using the wonderfully cutting-edge technology of the era, ASP and an Access database.

Nothing fancy.

But it worked.

Partners, attorneys and employees throughout the firm could pledge donations through the site, the firm matched contributions, and it ultimately helped generate millions of dollars for relief efforts.

I was 25 or 26 years old.

Looking back, I'm probably more proud of that little system than some far more technically impressive things I've built since.

It solved an immediate problem.

People wanted to help.

I happened to know how to build something that made it easier for them to do it.

That was enough.

A quarter century has now passed.

An entire generation of adults has been born since September 11. Someone who is 25 today knows 9/11 only as history, in roughly the same way I knew Vietnam growing up.

That is difficult for me to comprehend.

For those of us who lived through it, especially those who were in New York, Washington or Pennsylvania that day, it doesn't occupy the same part of the brain as ordinary history.

I can read about Pearl Harbor.

I watched, live, the Challenger exploding. In the fourth grade sitting next to a quiet crush on a girl named Sarah Hughes at JF Burns Elementary in Landen. Mr. Prater, our teacher (great guy), trying to grasp and explain it to us, shocked. Sarah crying because the teacher onboard was gone. Her excitement and hope shattered.

Where is she today?

I can study wars, assassinations, disasters and political upheaval.

But, September 11 is different.

I remember what the air looked like.

I remember the uncertainty.

I remember walking across that bridge.

I remember trying to get information when the Internet was failing.

I remember the radio.

I remember the Pentagon burning.

I remember Air Force One coming home. Standing outside with neighbors as it flew low over our neighborhood in Woodbridge, VA.

And I remember how strangely quiet and united the country became afterward.

That part is worth remembering too.

There were arguments, politics and mistakes in the years that followed. There always are. September 11 changed American foreign policy, surveillance, aviation, security and eventually led us into wars whose consequences we are still debating.

I ended up falling into gov't contracts, National Incident Management System, NIMS SC. NIMSTAR. etc., from 2006 to 2010, before exiting that world and going freelance. Personal overload. But I persist.

But to go back, history got complicated very quickly.

Memory is simpler.

Nearly 3,000 people went to work, boarded airplanes, responded to emergencies, sat at desks, served breakfast, attended meetings or started what they thought would be an ordinary Tuesday.

They never came home.

Thousands more carried the physical and psychological consequences of that day for years afterward.

Families were permanently altered.

And millions of the rest of us acquired one of those rare dividing lines in life.

Before 9/11.

After 9/11.

I am 50 now.

The 25-year-old walking out of Washington that afternoon feels like another person sometimes. Half my life sits between him and me.

But I know exactly what he saw.

Time doesn't erase moments like that. It just surrounds them with more life.

That may be the strangest thing about reaching the twenty-fifth anniversary.

September 11 is becoming history.

For me, it is still a vivid memory.

Twenty-five years later, the smoke is gone. The distance is not.

Remember them. All of them, except the "baddies".

September 11, 2001. A day that changed everything. So early in the 21^st century.