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.
Previously, access to Usenet had been almost exclusively through systems at universities, or a few government and very few commercial installations.
A list of BBSes in the 212 Area Code[1] contains the following note, attributed to Lee Fischman The movie referred to is BBS: The Documentary.
[4] In mid-1990,[5] 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.