This article is presented in the special issue of the winter carnival 2025.
While artificial intelligence has new heights around the world, college has run to integrate technology on campus. But this is not the first time that Dartmouth has posed the limits of technological innovation.
From the development of basic software in the 1960s to the advent of Blitzmail two decades later in 1988, the college has long been at the forefront of digital innovation and computer progress. While we are entering a new era of technological progress, Dartmouth began to explore the digital past of the college and – just as important – the rapid future.
A new digital age: Dartmouth Chat
In May 2024, the college launched Dartmouth Chat, a “version of an AI sandbox” which – on January 15 – offers students and teachers of seven large -language forum servers, according to the teacher English and special advisor to the provost for artificial intelligence James Dobson.
The servers, located in the basement of the Baker-Berry library, work to “take care of a capital problem in class” by offering members of the Dartmouth community equal access to emerging AI technologies, said Dobson.
According to the architect of the university research cyberinfrastructure Jonathan Crossett, the idea of strengthening the capacity of Dartmouth began around August 2023. He added that the idea came from a platform project of IA , of the implementation of the main director of research and data services at ITC Christian Darabos Christian Darabos played a central role.
“It started with the idea of aggregating tools that can be cowardly linked (to), artificial intelligence, generative AI and data science in general,” said Darabos.
To allow students and teachers to familiarize themselves with AI tools, the college information, technology and advice service has designed several iterations of its infrastructure, said Darabos. These public services included “the treatment of natural language, the analysis of feelings (and) the detection of objects,” he added.
In the design of the IA infrastructure of the college, Darabos explained that they hoped to create a platform that allows the use of a graphic user interface like Dartmouth Chat, as well as a “programmatic interface” – Who would allow him to connect to other applications-for research teachers, he added.
Eljo Kondi ’25, who works as a web developer for the AI project, said most of his work focuses on the construction of Dartmouth Chat.
The Digital Applied Learning and Innovation Lab team, where Kondi works on Dartmouth Chat, has teamed up with Dobson to “improve people understanding” from AI to college and make their model more “specific to Dartmouth” Added Kondi.
“Users should know what these models they choose,” said Kondi. “(Dartmouth Chat) should improve the ability of people to use cat -based models.”
Thanks to his work at the Provost Bureau, Dobson said he was working on a list of AI AI programs and AI tools for the college, including “AI literacy components” in The first -year seminars and a series with the Montgomery scholarship holders – the researchers invited on the campus to enrich the university community – for the “end of winter”.
Experts expect the passage from the college to pay. IT teacher Soroush Vosoughi said that Dartmouth AI servers will lead to “cost and time savings” while allowing the faculty to “personalize” their models.
“(Dartmouth’s infrastructure) reduces the entrance barrier, both in terms of cost and knowledge, for the use of AI,” said Vosoughi. “It protects privacy and also allows researchers to adapt and teachers to adapt AI models to their research and / or teaching needs.”
The concerns about data collection and AI institutional surveillance have led to data confidentiality problems. Dobson added that Dartmouth Chat users have the possibility of selecting a model that keeps all “on campus” data – an option that can benefit those working with “personal private data (or)”.
The functionality also aims to reduce the environmental footprint of the program, as it allows “right sizing” models for certain tasks, according to the college search engineer for high performance IT and Simon Stone.
“If you are, for example, using the GPT-4 (OPENAI), you use much more energy than if you use the LLAMA 3.2 model that we offer on our own resources,” he said.
Dartmouth’s technological history: from 1964 to now
Decades before the launch of Dartmouth Chat, the college was already repelling technological borders at the dawn of the computer era.
In 1961, the former president of the college John Kemeny and the math teacher Thomas Kurtz began “the implementation of computer science” in Dartmouth. The pair thought that “computer science should be as accessible to a undergraduate student as an open storage library”, according to an exhibition of Dartmouth libraries entitled “Computer sharing: how the time sharing system Dartmouth made computer (more) accessible ”.
In 1964, Kemeny and Kurtz developed Basic – an “easy -to -learn” programming language – and the Dartmouth time sharing system, which allowed several users to use a computer at the same time, depending on the website the exhibition.
Twenty-three years later, in 1987, Richard Brown, David Gelhar ’84, James Matthews Gr’96 and Kevin Schofield ’88 created the own Dartmouth messaging software, known as the name of BlitzmailUnder the direction of the Peter Kiewit IT services of the college.
According to Matthews, the idea of Dartmouth’s own messaging software emerged when Kiewit’s IT employees began to assert that this would benefit the Dartmouth community to have “a good messaging system” on the campus.
“Everything happened to a decision in the fall of 1987 that we should simply try to write a prototype messaging program in a month – we called it the” Mail month “, November 1987 – (and) before Christmas, We had a system where you can send emails back and forth, “said Matthews.
The name Blitzmail – which remains, to date, the term familiar campus for email – had been originally a space reserved for the system, according to Matthews. He explained that the name served as “reference to the speed at which (the group was) would try to bring it together”. The nickname remained, however, after a denomination competition failed to produce a comparable title, he added.
The following year, Blitzmail had his first public statement as a request from Macintosh and “really taken off,” said Matthews.
“When we started, use by email was a very unusual (and) rare thing,” he said. “We very quickly arrived at a point where he was universal – almost everyone on campus used it.”
While new student classes took their computers during the first -year orientation, “more than 95%” of them would send or receive a message the next day, Matthews added.
Andrew Bancero ’08, who worked as coordinator of the Blitzmail terminal, assumed the maintenance and inventory task throughout his stay in Dartmouth. He tended to around three dozen terminals located on campus, he said.
“Blitz (Mail) was very determined in Dartmouth,” said Bancero. “We were, even at the time, aware that it was an era, because technology was changing as quickly as today.”
After its creation, Blitzmail continued to evolve. In 1998, David Latham ’01 and Daniel Scholnick ’00 created WebblitzA website used to access Blitzmail – which could not be accessible before when students were far from the campus – Internet. According to Latham, the new program “has spread like forest fires”.
This widespread adoption cemented the blitzmail as an essential part of the life of the campus, shaping how students connected to each other.
Josh Wexler ’08 said Blitzmail was the “main” electronic communication form because there was a “zero cell service” in college when he attended. He added that the service is dear memories, including interaction with his Elizabeth Sherman ’08, now a woman.
“I specifically remember the library on the fourth floor of Berry and that I make blitz with her, a quick shot, back and forth … and we laughed so strong against the jokes of each other that we had to leave “He said.
Matthews said that the creators of Blitzmail “had not planned” his big role in the “social life of students”, while students sent “mass explosions of email” and began to use the word “blitz” as a verb. Even now, students continue to use the campus list to inform the student body of upcoming events and refer to attractive emails like “flitzes. “”
“Someone has seen the (Functionality of the Group’s message) and … said:” I will make a list of all those I know and that I started to send … An e-mail to say Where were every game (every week) “, said Matthews.
Despite the success of Blitzmail, the college decided to transition All undergraduate students in Outlook in 2011 and therefore close Blitzmail in 2012. According to Dartmouth’s previous reports, the college wanted a secure and reliable system and estimated that Microsoft was preferential for Google. However, the college would eventually go Google suite in 2019.
These days, when many are still wary of the emerging power of AI, the Dartmouth librarians argue that they are “well positioned” to help students and teachers understand what is “won” using Great language models, according to the dean associated with libraries, research and digital strategies Daniel Chamberlain.
“Twenty-five years ago, we help people fight with the value of Google research,” he said. “Fifteen years ago, we explained what Wikipedia was for and where its limits were.”