Rich Brown James Matthews David Gelhar
Special Projects, Computer Services
DARTMOUTH'S INTERNAL NETWORK, Blitz Mail™, is, to this day, the best e-mail system ever created in terms of ease of use. Two measures of software greatness: it never needed a manual to explain how it worked; the name of the product became a verb, to blitz. And it did more: it changed the very nature of the way the College communicates. On average, 125,000 messages zip back and forth between Macintosh computers here every day. Those messages carry news, memos, reminders, notices, term papers, even magazine articles and love letters. Rich Brown, Jim Matthews, and David Gelhar were the team that created Blitz Mail in the mid- eighties. They remain the creative minds down at Kiewit who continually improve and refine it. They have made it so easy and so popular that a social problem has emerged. Graduating seniors, without their fix of instant, no-hassle e-mail, suffer from withdrawal. The College— acutely aware of the problem and also of the larger trend toward e-mail every- where—has come up with a solution: Dartmouth e-mail addresses for all graduating seniors, and indeed, all Dartmouth graduates. The new system, up and running this fall, has the potential to change the way a much larger family communicates.
Rich Brown (left) and the BlitzMail™ team delivered from the start.
