The 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 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 Bulletin Board System 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.