I'm in Hanover, New Hampshire, visiting Dartmouth. It's hard to believe that it's been 16 years since I graduated from here. Actually, walking in front of the dorm where I lived my freshman year, I realized that it's almost exactly 20 years to the day since I first set foot on this campus.
Things change. My fraternity house was torn down two years ago and a new one built in its place (about time, too). The computer center where I had my first real programming job is also gone -- also about time, it was an ugly eyesore left over from the 1960's. There are new dorms and new halls.
Dartmouth has always been a pioneer in providing open, universal access to computing for everyone in the college community. They have deployed an 802.11b network covering essentially 100% of the campus -- including the open spaces. I spoke to Larry Levine, the CIO, this afternoon and he was quite insistent that they are committed to 100% coverage; his standing offer is that if anyone can find a dead zone, he'll send someone out with an access point. So far they have deployed just short of 600 access points, and they plan to triple that by extending support to 802.11g and 802.11a with 100% coverage. Wow.
In July of 1987 (the summer before my senior year), I and four other employees of the computer center embarked on a project to build a new email system for the campus, with a back-end on the college's mainframe and a Mac front-end. (all Dartmouth students, starting with the class of '88, were required to purchase a Mac) We worked nearly round the clock for a month to get it done before students started showing up on campus at the beginning of September, and because of that we called our quick-n-dirty email program Blitzmail. We expected a modest uptake (there were other means for people to read their email on the Macs) and were completely blown away by the overnight hit that it became.
I only got to stick around for the first year of Blitzmail's life -- it was a busy year for me and the rest of the team as we madly scrambled to fix bugs and performance issues and provision the system to support all the users. The system continued to grow in popularity over the years -- by the early 90's, professors were using Blitzmail to send out homework assignments and receive the completed work back. The administration was using it too. The computer center has continued development on both the front and back end, including a port to Windows. (Dartmouth switched to primarily PC's a number of years back, though they support Macs and Linux machines too). At one point they ran a contest to (finally) rename it from Blitzmail to somethingmore appropriate; the winning name was "Voxmail" (the motto of the school is "vox clamatis in deserto") but the name Blitzmail had stuck, and they just couldn't make the shift to the new name.
Here's the thing that really gets me though: Dartmouth students don't "email" each other; they "blitz." Our little 6-week project has changed not only the culture, but the vocabulary of the school. It got a write-up in the New York Times last summer. Googling it also gives an interesting snippet of the cultural phenomenon it has become. I haven't visited Dartmouth for about 5 years, and that was the last that I had heard that Blitzmail was still up and running and had become part of the vocabulary. To be honest, I had completely forgotten how pervasive it had become, and I just sort of assumed that something better had come along and it had faded into history. Last night I was sitting in the basement of my (coed) fraternity house talking to a recent pledge, and when I quizzed her about her knowledge of house information, she complained that the information I requested had not been "blitzed" to her -- and I doubled up in laughter.
So here's the real irony: of all the Type-A rugged individualists who matriculate at Dartmouth, I was probably one of the least likely to make an indelible mark on this school. Dartmouth evokes a particularly bipolar reaction in its students and alums: 95% fanatically love it, 5% hate it. No one is in the middle. I was in the 5%; I was miserable for four years here. I got a great education, but I was not particualrly social and I did a poor job of taking advantage of everything that the college and New Hampshire has to offer outside the classroom. Bascially, I hid.
At least my name no longer appears on the "About" dialog in Blitzmail, so I can live in relative anonymity. By the way, my original co-conspirators were Rich Brown, David Gelhar, Jim Matthews, and Jim Van Verth.
9:15:59 PM  ; ;
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