For the song, see Adrian Belew

Adrian Belew

Adrian Belew is an American guitarist, singer, songwriter, multi-instrumentalist and record producer...

, for the Australian band, see Big Electric Cat

Big Electric Cat

Big Electric Cat is a gothic rock group from Sydney, Australia, formed by musicians Paul Sadler and Deborah Denton, who had moved from London to Sydney in 1989. In 1991, inspired by Philip K...

The Big Electric Cat, named for an Adrian Belew song, was a public access computer system in New York City

New York City

New York is the most populous city in the United States and the center of the New York Metropolitan Area, one of the most populous metropolitan areas in the world. New York exerts a significant impact upon global commerce, finance, media, art, fashion, research, technology, education, and...

 in the late 1980s, known on Usenet

Usenet

Usenet is a worldwide distributed Internet discussion system. It developed from the general purpose UUCP architecture of the same name.Duke University graduate students Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis conceived the idea in 1979 and it was established in 1980...

 as node dasys1.

History

Based on a Stride Computer

SAGE Computer Technology

SAGE Computer Technology was a computer company based in Reno, Nevada, United States.Founded in 1981 by Rod Coleman, Bill Bonham and Bob Needham; it went through several name changes. The change from Sage computer came about when "Sage Software" in Maryland demanded the cease of using the name Sage...

 brand minicomputer

Minicomputer

A minicomputer is a class of multi-user computers that lies in the middle range of the computing spectrum, in between the largest multi-user systems and the smallest single-user systems...

 running the UniStride Unix

Unix

Unix is a multitasking, multi-user computer operating system originally developed in 1969 by a group of AT&T employees at Bell Labs, including Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, Brian Kernighan, Douglas McIlroy, and Joe Ossanna...

 variant, the Big Electric Cat (sometimes known as BEC) provided dialup modem

Modem

A modem is a device that modulates an analog carrier signal to encode digital information, and also demodulates such a carrier signal to decode the transmitted information. The goal is to produce a signal that can be transmitted easily and decoded to reproduce the original digital data...

 users with text terminal-based

Computer terminal

A computer terminal is an electronic or electromechanical hardware device that is used for entering data into, and displaying data from, a computer or a computing system...

 access to Usenet at no charge.

This was the first such system in New York, and one of the very first in the world. Previously, access to Usenet had been almost exclusively through systems at universities

University

A university is an institution of higher education and research, which grants academic degrees in a variety of subjects. A university is an organisation that provides both undergraduate education and postgraduate education...

, or a few government and very few commercial installations. While Bulletin Board System

Bulletin board system

A Bulletin Board System, or BBS, is a computer system running software that allows users to connect and log in to the system using a terminal program. Once logged in, a user can perform functions such as uploading and downloading software and data, reading news and bulletins, and exchanging...

 culture and Fidonet

FidoNet

FidoNet is a worldwide computer network that is used for communication between bulletin board systems. It was most popular in the early to mid 1990s, prior to the introduction of easy and affordable access to the Internet...

 existed at the time, systems which allowed the general public to access Usenet were virtually unknown. As with many early Internet and Usenet systems, a community began to form among users of the system which had occasional outings to restaurants.

BEC was started by four college students, with one of them, Rob Sweeney, owning the equipment. The other sysops were Charles Foreman, Lee Fischman, and Richard Newman.

A list of BBS' in the 212 Area Code contains the following note, attributed to Lee Fischman

I was one of the sysops. Originally we were set up (illicitly) in the computer room of a midtown advertising agency. It is a VERY amusing story -- pity you didn't know about it before the movie! We eventually migrated to the offices of a communications firm elsewhere in the city. I still have the Big Electric Cat user manual, with its very entertaining cover. Robert Sweeney was killed in a motorcycle accident in 2001.

The movie referred to is BBS: The Documentary

BBS: The Documentary

BBS: The Documentary is a 3-disc, 8-episode documentary about the subculture born from the creation of the bulletin board system filmed by computer historian Jason Scott Sadofsky of textfiles.com....

.

BEC was not intended to be a profit-making operation, charging fees that were designed only to cover operating costs, (Phrack reports $5 per month for an account at the end of 1989, though the system may have in fact been out of operation by then, and other sources note that the system was supported by donations) and relying entirely on volunteer labor.

In mid-1990, after increasingly unreliable operation, The Big Electric Cat suffered what proved to be fatal hardware failure, leaving a gap which was filled by some its users founding one of the first commercial ISPs ever, Panix

Panix (ISP)

Panix is the third-oldest ISP in the world after NetCom and the World. Originally running on A/UX on an Apple Macintosh IIfx, Panix has gone through a number of transitions as the Internet has grown. It maintains a vibrant community of shell users and posters to its private panix.* USENET newsgroups...

.

2600 Magazine founder Eric Corley used a Big Electric Cat account.