Up to this point in your life what is the most important global changing moment in your mind and why?

(Miniskirts – definitely mini-skirts. )

This is a difficult thing to ascertain – there are too many different things that interweave with regard to effect – usually it is not so cut and dried as to point at one single issue. From my point of view – IT would be it. Computers, digital logic and the internet. I have been involved with computers since the first Philips 2650 chip became available. Had one built a few months later – way before there were any commercially available. When the Z80 came out it was an amazing step upward. (An eight bit chip with a single sixteen bit register…)

I saw the end of apartheid, it was fantastic! People dancing in the streets. Our President dancing on TV. It was freedom! The air was thick with excitation. The streets jam packed with people, huge buses, it was bedlam.

I also experienced civil war in Zimbabwe, travelling in convoy and avoiding land-mines.

It changed me because I understood oppression and freedom, I understood not to take freedom for granted. How minorities can rule, how legislation can kill a person, man made constructs followed like sheep. That’s why I question everything, not just what I see.

My mom remembered seeing her first Inside the house toilet, the first car she saw, and the first television (in a store window). Hard to surpass those.
For me, the first Man on the Moon.

9/11. Although I’m not American it has changed the the way the whole world works. Plus it got my brother in law killed by a terrorists IED.

9/11 – I noticed a complete shift in what was being covered on the news in North America from that day forward

My son and I watched some American soldiers help a bunch of Iraquis pull down a statue of Saddam Hussein. He was 9 or 10. I told him to pay attention, this was a moment in history. He references it to me every so often now.

Before my time but to me, the space race – for all it’s up and down sides, it showed what can be done when people put their minds to it. To me it’s possibly the most significant event of our time because of that illustration.

During my time, the end of the cold war (the change in my parents generation and the nations outlook and commitments), the internet (for it’s ability to connect and change the way we view the world), or quite possibly CNN (it changed for better or worse the way nearly everyone was informed).

ENIAC

To me, the most important world changing event was 9/11— so much stuff happened because of it: unneccesary wars, more corruption, death, revelations… and the pertinence and truth of the event goes deeper than most people (are willing to) imagine

The Industrial Revolution, subsequent excessive burning of fossil fuels and apparent climate change. Besides the feeling of impending apocalypse I could do without this incessant rain.

I’m old enough to have witnessed the space race. As far as direct impact on my life, I would have to say 9/11. I had been married for less than two years; over the next 8 years, I was able to be with my wife less than two years total, overseas deployments. When I finally retired, my wife is killed in a traffic accident less than six months later. In retrospect, 9/11 wrecked my life.

The accident at Three Mile Island caused the US to turn away from nuclear power. The fossil fuels burned as a consequence may be a major contribution to climate change. The lack of a real US national energy policy contributes heavily to this situation also.

Fire. Definitely fire.

In my particular life the earliest Major Change was the advent of television. He asked, “in your life….” Early fifties, black and white, a few channels.