The Legacy of Big Brother (The Last Word)
"(The Legacy of) Big Brother" is the fifth instalment of the blog The Last Word, authored by Will Rothers (better known as Big Brother, the former webmaster of The Residents' official website). It was published on February 3rd 2008.
In this blog, Rothers details the history of the Big Brother BBS system, the news delivery computer system used by The Cryptic Corporation in the mid 1980s, which preceded Rothers in the role of "Big Brother".
The blog
(The Legacy of) Big Brother
These days, we are all used to the internet. Running around on the web seems perfectly normal now, but of course it wasn't always that way. To acknowledge the arrival of 1984, the notorious year described in George Orwell's book, The Residents launched Big Brother, a BBS system. They took a bold step for the times by attaching an old Apple IIcomputer with 64K of memory and 2 floppy disc drives that each held 400K of data to a phone line.
People who had computers could use a modem running at 300 bps (dial-up today is 56,000 and DSL is in the millions of bps) to connect with the computer at Ralph Records. The two computers connected over the phone. The communication was text-only, and only one person could call the Ralph computer at a time. Even so, Big Brother was an instant hit. Not only could users leave messages for each other, but Ralph ran their own reviews of underground records and maintained an internal "top-ten" list based on what the workers liked.
The staff was watching the premier of a Michael Jackson Pepsi commercial on TV. Somebody decided to report it play-by-play onto the BBS site as he watched. While shooting the commercial, Jackson's hair caught on fire from one of the effect bombs.
Real time reporting via computer was a new wrinkle at the time. Soon the San Francisco Chronicle picked up the story and Big Brother became well known in the San Francisco area. A side note here; because users called the BBS on the phone, long distance rates would apply for people outside the area, so most users lived around San Francisco.
Anyway, the story got picked up, and soon Big Brother and The Residents were on the cover of Silicon Valley's Info Week magazine as well as getting coverage by other tech and computer geek publications.
But Big Brother had always been an experiment locked to the year 1984. So after one year, the BBS site discontinued operation. Big Brother disappeared.
Twenty years later a plan was hatched to launch an official Residents web site and it was only fitting that its operator be named after Big Brother. So today we have the reincarnation of the spirit of the original BBS system, the Big Brother System.
© 2007 The Cryptic Corporation