Okay. It's agreed. This page wasn't really uploaded on the date listed on the main contents page. Frankly, it wasn't even conceived yet, though perhaps I did already had a vague picture somewhere in my head of what I'd be writing about. But if I'm usually in a position to choose my upload date, and when doing so take into consideration what else happened on that same date, not uploading on a particular date gives me even more leeway. To put it quite simply, it gives me so many more dates to choose from. It's sort of like the relationship of birthdays to un-birthdays. And from all those possible dates, January 24 seems to be a great day for the occasion.

It was on January 24, 1984 that Apple Computers unveiled the first Macintosh computer, drastically changing the way in which people interacted with their computers and ushering in the era of the graphic user interface. It's an honor to be associated in some small hypertextual way with that date.

But that's not the only almost.

January 24 is, after all, almost, January 25. Had I chosen to not upload, for instance, on January 25 instead of not choosing January 24 as my not-uploaded date of choice, I could have mentioned one of the least known but most important almosts of the last half of the twentieth century, or at least of the 90's. It was on January 25, 1995 that Russia almost unleashed a barrage of nuclear missiles because it mistakenly thought it was being attacked. Most reports tell us that one minute before the deadline for launching retaliatory missiles the mysterious object on the radar screen dropped into the sea, and the alert was called off. What looked like an attack was actually a Norwegian scientific missile about which Norway had reported to the Russian government, information which the government had somehow forgotten to pass on to the radar crew. Sometimes almost means not succeeding in getting around to doing something, and it carries with it a hint of failure. In this particular case we can all be thankful for that failure.

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