This article is featured in the 2025 Winter Carnival Special Issue.
As artificial intelligence reaches new heights across the globe, the College has been racing to integrate the technology on campus. But this isn’t the first time Dartmouth has pushed boundaries on technology innovation.
From the development of BASIC software in the 1960s to the advent of BlitzMail two decades later in 1988, the College has long since been at the forefront of digital innovation and computing advancements. As we move into a new era of technological progress, The Dartmouth set off to explore the College’s digital past and — just as important — the fast-approaching future.
A New Digital Age: Dartmouth Chat
In May 2024, the College launched Dartmouth Chat, a “version of an AI sandbox” that — as of Jan. 15 — provides students and faculty with seven large language model forum servers, according to English professor and special advisor to the Provost for artificial intelligence James Dobson.
The servers, located in the basement of Baker-Berry Library, work to “take care of an equity issue in the classroom” by offering Dartmouth community members equal access to emerging AI technologies, Dobson said.
According to College research cyberinfrastructure architect Jonathan Crossett, the idea to build out Dartmouth’s AI capacity began around August 2023. He added that the idea originated within an AI platform project, the implementation of which senior director of research computing and data services at ITC Christian Darabos played a pivotal role.
“It started with the idea of aggregating tools that may be loosely related [to] machine learning, artificial intelligence, generative AI and data science in general,” Darabos said.
To allow students and faculty to familiarize themselves with AI tools, the College’s Information, Technology and Consulting department designed several iterations of its infrastructure, Darabos said. Those utilities included “natural language processing, sentiment analysis [and] object detection,” he added.
In designing the College’s AI infrastructure, Darabos explained that they hoped to create a platform that allows use of both a graphical user interface like Dartmouth Chat, as well as a “programmatic interface” — which would allow it to connect to other applications — for faculty research, he added.
Eljo Kondi ’25, who works as a web developer for the AI project, said most of his work focuses on building Dartmouth Chat.
The Digital Applied Learning and Innovation Lab’s team, where Kondi works on Dartmouth Chat, partnered with Dobson to “enhance people’s understandings” of AI at the College and make its model more “Dartmouth-specific,” Kondi added.
“Users should know what all these models they’re choosing are,” Kondi said. “[Dartmouth Chat] should enhance people’s ability to use chat-based models.”
Through his work in the Office of the Provost, Dobson said he has been working on a slate of AI programs and AI tools for the College, including “AI literacy components” in First-Year Seminars and a series with the Montgomery Fellows — scholars invited to campus to enrich the academic community — for the “end of winter term.”
Experts are expecting the College’s move into AI to pay off. Computer science professor Soroush Vosoughi said Dartmouth’s AI servers will result in “cost and time savings” while allowing the faculty the freedom to “personalize” their models.
“[Dartmouth’s AI infrastructure] reduces the barrier for entry, both in terms of cost and knowledge, for use of AI,” Vosoughi said. “It protects privacy, and it also allows for researchers to tailor and teachers to tailor AI models to their research and/or teaching needs.”
Concerns about AI-driven data collection and institutional oversight have led to data privacy concerns. Dobson added that Dartmouth Chat users have the opportunity to select a model that keeps all data “on campus” — an option that may benefit those working with “personal [or] private data.”
The feature is also aimed at reducing the program’s environmental footprint, as it allows “right-sizing” models for certain tasks, according to the College’s research software engineer for high performance computing and AI Simon Stone.
“If you’re, for example, using [OpenAI’s] GPT-4, you’re using way more energy than if you’re using the Llama 3.2 model that we’re offering on our own resources,” he said.
Dartmouth’s Tech History: From 1964 to Now
Decades before the launch of Dartmouth Chat, the College was already pushing technological boundaries at the dawn of the computer age.
In 1961, former College President John Kemeny and mathematics professor Thomas Kurtz began the “implementation of computing” at Dartmouth. The pair believed that “computing should be as accessible to an undergraduate student as an open-stack library,” according to a Dartmouth Libraries exhibit titled “Sharing the Computer: How the Dartmouth Time-Sharing System Made Computing (More) Accessible.”
In 1964, Kemeny and Kurtz developed BASIC — an “easy-to-learn” programming language — and the Dartmouth Time-Sharing System, which allowed multiple users to use a computer at the same time, according to the exhibit website.
Twenty-three years later, in 1987, Richard Brown, David Gelhar ’84, James Matthews GR’96 and Kevin Schofield ’88 created Dartmouth’s own email software, known as BlitzMail, under the direction of the College’s Peter Kiewit Computer Services.
According to Matthews, the idea for Dartmouth’s own email software emerged when IT employees at Kiewit began arguing that it would benefit the Dartmouth community to have “a good email system” on campus.
“It all came down to a decision in the fall of 1987 that we should just try to write a prototype email program in one month — we called it the ‘mail month,’ November 1987 — [and] before Christmas, we had a system where you could send emails back and forth,” Matthews said.
The BlitzMail name — which remains, to this day, the colloquial campus term for emailing — had originally been a placeholder for the system, according to Matthews. He explained that the name served as a “reference to how fast [the group was] going to try to put it together.” The moniker stuck, however, after a naming contest failed to produce a comparable title, he added.
The following year, BlitzMail had its first public release as a Macintosh application and “really took off,” Matthews said.
“When we started, using email was a very unusual [and] rare thing,” he said. “We very quickly got to a point where it was universal — virtually everybody on campus was using it.”
As new classes of students picked up their computers during freshman orientation, “more than 95%” of them would send or receive a message by the next day, Matthews added.
Andrew Blancero ’08, who worked as a BlitzMail terminal coordinator, took on the task of maintenance and inventory throughout his time at Dartmouth. He tended to approximately three dozen terminals located on campus, he said.
“Blitz[Mail] was very defining of Dartmouth,” Blancero said. “We were, even at the time, aware that it was of an era, because technology was changing as quickly then as it is now.”
After its creation, BlitzMail continued to evolve. In 1998, David Latham ’01 and Daniel Scholnick ’00 created WebBlitz, a website used to access BlitzMail — which could not previously be accessed when students were away from campus — from the internet. According to Latham, the new program “spread like wildfire.”
This widespread adoption cemented BlitzMail as an essential part of campus life, shaping how students connected with one another.
Josh Wexler ’08 said BlitzMail was the “main” form of electronic communication because there was “zero cell service” at the College when he attended. He added that the service holds cherished memories, including one interaction with his now-wife Elizabeth Sherman ’08.
“I remember specifically sitting at the library on the fourth floor of Berry and just Blitzing with her, rapid-fire, back and forth … and we were laughing so hard at each other’s jokes that we had to leave,” he said.
Matthews said BlitzMail’s creators “did not anticipate” its large role in “students’ social life,” as students sent “mass email blasts” and started to use the word “blitz” as a verb. Even now, students continue to use the campus listserv to notify the student body of upcoming events and refer to flirty emails as “flitzes.”
“Somebody saw the [group message feature] and … said, ‘I’m gonna make a list of everybody I know and started sending … an email out to say where all the parties were [every week],’” Matthews said.
Despite BlitzMail’s success, the College decided to transition all undergraduates to Outlook in 2011 and consequently shut down BlitzMail in 2012. According to past reporting by The Dartmouth, the College wanted a secure, dependable system and felt that Microsoft was preferential to Google. However, the College would eventually shift to Google Suite in 2019.
These days, while many are still wary of the emerging power of AI, Dartmouth librarians argue that they are “well positioned” to help students and faculty understand what is “gained” through using large language models, according to associate dean of libraries, research and digital strategies Daniel Chamberlain.
“Twenty-five years ago, we were helping people wrestle with the value of a Google search,” he said. “Fifteen years ago, we were explaining what Wikipedia was good for and where its limits were.”
