"Do you remember when . . .?"

Twenty years ago, the Challenger was destroyed shortly after take-off. For many people, it was the 1980s equivalent of the Kennedy assassination . . . people remember exactly when they heard the news. I'm no different.

I was working as a co-op student at IBM Canada, when Don McCaig, one of the "lifers", came up to me in the hall and said, in a shocked voice, "the shuttle just blew up". I didn't immediately grasp what he was talking about — we had a company van we called "the shuttle" to move staff from the main lab building to the office building in which we worked. At first, I thought he meant that shuttle. I started to make some lame joke about auto maintenance, and then it hit me what he was really talking about.