Danny Lewin, the first to die in the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on Twin Towers

A NEW book is celebrating the life of tech guru Danny Lewin - the man believed to have been the first victim of the September 11 terrorist attacks.

A NEW book is celebrating the life of tech guru Danny Lewin - the man believed to have been the first victim of the September 11 terrorist attacks.

Lewin was on American Airlines Flight 11, which took off from Boston at 8am on that fateful day. It was the first to be hijacked and flew into the North Tower of the World Trade Center.

Conversations from two flight attendants with ground control fleshed out some of what happened. While it was initially suspected that terrorist Satam al-Suqami shot and killed Lewin, the 9/11 Commission detailed in its final report that Lewin, an Israeli-American who served in the most elite counterterrorism unit of the Israel Defence Force, had his throat slit around 8:15-8:20am after trying to overpower the terrorists.

Lewin was sitting in seat 9B. With his Israeli military training and understanding of Arabic, he may have figured out what was going on.

It is outlined in a new book No Better Time: The Brief, Remarkable Life of Danny Lewin, the Genius Who Transformed the Internet by Molly Knight Raskin.

But Lewin is not only a would-be hero but ironically he was also the man who founded Akamai Technologies and a bunch of algorithms that helped the internet survive the amount of traffic it experienced on September 11. 

It was because of Akamai, which is responsible for more than 30 per cent of the world’s internet traffic, that almost every major news site remained up and running that day.

Akamai's October 1999 share market float made Lewin an overnight billionaire.  Akamai, which means smart or clever in Hawaiian, is a multibillion dollar company today and has clients include Sony, Apple and News Corp.

Many believe that if Lewin had survived that people today would talk about him in the same way they do about Bill Gates and Steve Jobs.

Lewin is survived by his wife Anne and sons Eitan and Itamar.