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Last week, Networld+Interop 2001 in Atlanta was supposed to be the gathering place of the entire networking industry, where customers would meet companies, and the products that will shape our industry's future would debut. But it was not to be. Tuesday I walked into the show fully prepared to fulfill my duties as a Best of Show Awards judge. I caught sight of a dozen or more people gathered tightly together. Perhaps a famous baseball player was signing autographs? Perhaps they were hanging around an information booth?

I soon found out they were watching a TV tuned to the latest news coverage of that day’s tragic events in New York City and Washington D.C. It was shortly after ten o'clock, and details were sketchy. Internet kiosks were vainly trying to reach CNN.COM, MSNBC, anything. Word filtered out about the planes. Misinformation was everywhere. I stumbled around the show looking for booths I needed to visit. Every face was blank -- stunned in utter disbelief.

The CNN Center across the street had already been evacuated. People wondered what to do: stay here and demo products, trade a business card or two, or leave. No one even knew if the show would go on at all. It didn't. The show's organizers wisely called an end to this particular edition of N+I.

I left, walking back to the hotel with a few Network Computing technical editors, where we waited for more details to pour in. While we stood around, I grabbed a copy of the Networld+Interop Daily. It was filled with details about the show, including the keynote addresses by the CEO of Network Appliance and the chairman of Novell. Ten-gigabit Ethernet was supposed to be all the rage. And a bevy of startups were ready to plant their stakes in the networking ground.

We all soon realized -- even those that had invested tens of thousands of dollars in these fancy products -- that there was something more important than this business, and that was life itself.

And thus began the exodus. Anxious business people tried to find any way possible to return to their families. Along the way, we began to realize just what we had lost. We'd lost innovators such as Daniel Lewin, one of the brains behind Akamai Technologies. He was on one of the two flights that crashed into the World Trade Center. On the day his company went public, Lewin's net worth rocketed to $1.6 billion. And the stock went up from there. Recently it has been falling like everyone else's, but Lewin remained a deservedly wealthy individual. And, like many, he carried on with his business, even when he could be cruising the coast in a 120-foot yacht.

Lewin was raised in Jerusalem and was an officer in the Israeli military. On the flight he took out of Boston on September 11, he was sitting a row behind two of the hijackers in Business Class. He spoke Arabic fluently and probably had a pretty good idea of the plane's ultimate fate.