The Big Electric Cat

:"This article is about a computer system." :"For the song, see Adrian Belew", "for the Australian band, see Big Electric Cat"

The Big Electric Cat, named for an Adrian Belew song, was a public access computer system in New York City in the late 1980s, known on Usenet as node dasys1.

Based on a Stride Computer brand minicomputer running the UniStride Unix variant, the Big Electric Cat (sometimes known as BEC) provided dialup modem users with text terminal-based 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, or a few government and very few commercial installations. While BBS culture and Fidonet 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 [http://bbslist.textfiles.com/212/ List of 212 BBS'] 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 .

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) [http://www.phrack.org/issues.html?id=2&issue=30 Phrack Volume Three, Issue 30, File #2 of 12, "Network Miscellany III"] and relying entirely on volunteer labor. [Message from Rob Sweeney comparing BEC to operating a coffeehouse http://www.etext.org/Zines/ASCII/Future.Culture/FUCU364.TXT Future Culture (an online zine) Issue #364 Friday, April 16th 1993]

Sometime around 1989, 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 [http://asgard.actrix.co.nz/macintosh/hypercard/hyper.txt 1988 Usenet posting originating from the Big Electric Cat written by Panix founder Alexis Rosen] .

2600 Magazine founder Eric Corley used a Big Electric Cat account. [http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/5.77.html The Risks Digest, Volume 5: Issue 77Thursday, 17 December 1987, with a posting from Eric Corley]

References