Within three days after the 2001 September 11 attacks , people were using over 25 different online forums and survivor registries to report and check on their family and friends . One of the first and largest of these was the survivor registry at safe.millennium.berkeley.edu , which was created by graduate students Ka-Ping Yee and Miriam Walker and hosted on the Millennium computer cluster at UC Berkeley . To reduce the confusion caused by the proliferation of different websites , the Berkeley survivor registry began collecting data from several of the other major sites into one searchable database . Because the information was formatted differently from site to site , each site required manual effort and custom programming to download and incorporate its data
September 11 attacks
September 11 attacks
People Finder Interchange Format