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: