Ned Kenney (Dartmouth '10) interviews Jim Matthews, a software developer and Dartmouth employee from 1987 to 2001 who played a central role in the creation of Blitzmail (aka "Blitz"), writing its Mac client. (Mac client = the program you used a bajillion times if you attended Dartmouth in the era of public Blitz terminals and weren't afraid of getting pinkeye.)

Blitz, an email/instant messaging hybrid, was literally decades ahead of its time and would become as much a cultural institution at Dartmouth as a technical one. It was eventually replaced by Microsoft software in 2011, but for over 20 years, it was the primary mode of communication for members of the Dartmouth community.

During its reign, most Dartmouth students would stop to "check blitz" at public computers multiple times throughout the day, eschewing text messages and phone calls even as cell reception on campus improved and phones themselves got more advanced.

"Blitz" was used as both a noun (e.g. "I just got a blitz from her") and a verb (e.g. "I'll blitz him"); other Blitz-related words that made it into the Dartmouth lexicon included "flitzing" (exchanging flirty messages) and "blitzwars" (rapid-fire emails sent out to hundreds of fellow students).

We'd recommend that before you listen to this episode, you check out our interview with Naval Ravikant '95, CEO/Founder of AngelList, at laughable.com/navalravikant. In that interview, Naval alerted us to Jim's instrumental role in Blitz' development. That spurred us to reach out to Jim himself. He was a great guest and we appreciate his taking the time to speak with us.

38s: Jim's early years at Dartmouth

2m 46s: The technology landscape at Dartmouth in the 1980s

4m 21s: President John Kemeny's legacy of technological innovation

8m 45s: Blitz at its inception

17m 30s: The Blitz adoption curve

20m 25s: Just how ahead of its time was Blitz?

22m 55s: The transferability of the Blitz codebase

29m 2s: Scaling the platform and other challenges through the 1990s

37m 20s: Blitz' cultural impact

39m 42s: How can Dartmouth become even more of a leader on the technology front going forward