Blitzmail

An Anonymous Patron writes “Kind of a Neat Story on the BlitzMail system at Dartmouth College. For nearly 20 years, the 13,000-odd students, faculty and staff members of Dartmouth have communicated by using Blitzmail. Strictly speaking, Blitzmail is a campuswide e-mail system, but it is so fast that it qualifies as instant messaging. And as instant messaging becomes a fixture on college campuses, Blitzmail serves as a signpost for what others might come to expect when most communication on campus is accomplished by way of keyboards.”

August 18, 2003 by Uncategorized 2

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2 Responses

  1. Anonymous Patron says:
    August 19, 2003 at 5:40 am

    email
    Was like that at my school, except not quite as widely adopted. Of course the people I hung out with, used it like that. It woulda helped lots if all the profs had been on-board. Then again, it might have accelerated this Blackboard BS, so maybe it was a good thing they didn’t all hop on board.

    — Ender, Duke_of_URL
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    Reply
  2. hradcany1 says:
    September 4, 2003 at 2:03 am

    Blitzmail at Dartmouth
    I’m a recent alum of Dartmouth and can report that Blitzmail is the main means of communication on campus for students, professors and administrators alike. I don’t think I really used the telephone during my four years there except to call off campus.

    Blitzmail is even better than instant messenger since you can send a message to multiple people simultaneously (it’s basically an email system) instead of having to set up a chat room that members then need to enter manually. This, combined with a campus culture that has people logged in whenever they’re at a computer, allows for pretty much instantaneous communication across campus and anywhere else that uses email.
    (I often sent a message out to a list of friends asking if they wanted to meet for dinner in about half an hour. Within about 5 minutes, I’d probably have answers from well over half of the people on my list.)

    There are also ‘Blitz Bulletins’ that function the same way but are set up as listservs. Very useful for announcements, though lots of campus orgs have “blitzlists” of their own and send announcements directly to people’s personal accounts.

    It’s hard for most Dartmouth grads to transition into life without Blitzmail. It was for me.

    Reply

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