Ubiquity
Breeds Utility
VentureBlog, a random walk
down Sand Hill Road
In the late 1980s, Dartmouth College was the most wired campus on the
planet, running 10Mb Ethernet into every dorm room. Today, Dartmouth is
the most unwired campus on the planet, with 560 access points covering
200 acres. At a recent conference here, Larry Levine, the head of
computing services, challenged attendees to find a single spot on
campus and surrounding areas that did not have 802.11 coverage. Even
the boathouse, adjacent sections of the Connecticut river, the ski
lodge, and sections of the ski slope are covered!
If you wanted to know where wired communications were headed in the
late 1980s, all you had to do was go to the Dartmouth campus and look
at their homegrown email application, Blitzmail. As any regular user of
Blitzmail will tell you, it included a server-side address book and
remote private and public folders before almost any other email
application. Watching a regular user of Blitzmail, you could have
predicted the rise of LDAP, IMAP, and most importantly Instant
Messenger - Blitzmail was so fast and so ubiquitous, that people used
it for IM-style back-and-forth conversations long before IM became
popular in the larger environment.
At the conference, I looked for similar insights regarding wireless
networks on the Dartmouth Campus. A few observations:...
6:44:29 PM 
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