The BIGBEN server — the shared foundation behind the radio station, search engine, websites, and FTP on the Studentski Grad network, Sofia
OverviewM
BIGBEN Server is the umbrella name for the computer and the entire service infrastructure behind Radio Bigben, BIGBEN Search, and BIGBEN Video on the Studentski Grad network in Sofia. This wasn't a separate product with a story of its own, but the foundation itself — a single server named BIGBEN, running a radio station, a file search engine, websites, and FTP all at once.
The idea was simple and typical of the time: instead of each service having its own machine, everything came together in one place — one computer, one network address, one person maintaining it. That way, the radio station, the search engine, the catalog, and the file services became more than just neighbors — they were parts of one integrated system, each complementing the others.
It all began in the fall of 2003, in block 54: a single computer broadcast Radio Bigben on the local network. That same year, alongside the radio station, BIGBEN Search — the file search engine — launched on the same machine. From then on, BIGBEN was no longer just a “radio station,” but a server that served the network with several services at once.
Over time, a web interface for the search engine with its own site was added alongside the radio and the search engine, along with BIGBEN Video — a catalog of movie titles with a poster, a brief description, and a download link.
The server grew along the same path as the network around it — from block 54 to 55, then 59, then 52, until it covered all of Studentski Grad. This growth coincided with the arrival of Megalan — an internet provider founded in 2001 — in the complex, and with the gradual merging of the individual block networks into shared infrastructure. The exact dates of each step are lost to time — more than 20 years have passed since then.
The server ran until March 2007 — nearly four years, until Georgi Georgiev left the Studentski Grad network; outside it, the services, entirely tied to the local infrastructure, had no way to continue.
server
radio
search engine
web
FTP
Computer
BIGBEN — bigben.bl-54.studgrad.net (internal, accessible only on the Studentski Grad network)
Radio — Radio Bigben: broadcasting entirely over IP, directly on the local network, with no FM frequency and no traditional transmitter. Two channels — CHR around the clock and Trance every evening between 8 p.m. and midnight; the program ran on a licensed copy of radio-automation software (RadioSoft) and a music library of around 4,000 mp3 files.
Search — BIGBEN Search: searching files shared on the block networks over SMB, and later over FTP as well. The database updated automatically through periodic network scans, with no manual work involved.
Web — the search engine's web interface with its own site, where users entered a search and got results with direct links, and the BIGBEN Video site with posters, descriptions, and download links. It was reachable at bigben.bl-54.studgrad.net — an internal address on the Studentski Grad network, most likely served through Apache for Windows, the usual choice for that combination of technologies at the time.
FTP — with FTP, the search engine showed the file name and a download link in the results.
How They Worked Together
The server's strength was that the services weren't separated — they complemented each other. All of them — the search engine, the radio station, the websites, and FTP — were reached through the same computer on the network, named BIGBEN.
The catalog and the search engine worked in tandem: the visual and text information for a movie came from BIGBEN Video, while the file download itself came from BIGBEN Search. The radio station, meanwhile, was the system's voice: through RadioSoft's built-in RDS feature, it displayed text messages on listeners' players, rendered through a Flash player in the browser — this was how it read out their shout-outs, without needing a live voice on air.
To a user in the dorms, it all felt like one complete “world” on the network: you'd listen to the radio, search for music or a movie, browse the catalog, and download what you wanted — without ever leaving Studentski Grad's local network, in the days before streaming platforms and cloud services.
The Computer and the Network
The whole system sat on a single Windows desktop computer, loaded with the extensive music library, the search engine's database, and additional broadcasting software — powerful enough to run the radio station, the local IP stream to the dormitory network, the search engine, and the sites all at once.
The server ran around the clock without interruption: the radio station unattended, on a preset schedule, at night, on weekends, at any time; the search engine, with its database updating on its own.
The network around it was built block by block: separate providers covered separate dormitories, with almost no connectivity between blocks — until the individual networks gradually merged into shared infrastructure. That was exactly what let BIGBEN's services grow from a single block to all of Studentski Grad.
The software around the search engine was open source — a typical choice for homegrown network tools of that era, when student networks relied on lightweight, freely available solutions, extended and adapted to the needs of the specific network, rather than on a commercial product.
Reach
Blocks in Studentski Grad averaged 8 floors, around 14 rooms per floor, and two people per room — roughly 900 to 1,100 people per block. Just the first four blocks of the expansion (54, 55, 59, 52) meant a potential reach in the thousands, before the services even reached all of Studentski Grad. The most-searched content on the search engine was movies and music.
Team
BIGBEN Server was maintained entirely by Georgi Georgiev — no team, no division of roles, the same model as Radio Bigben, BIGBEN Search, and BIGBEN Video: one person and one server.
Connection to the Other Projects
Radio Bigben, BIGBEN Search, and BIGBEN Video weren't separate projects, but different faces of the same server — a shared computer, a shared network, a shared period in Studentski Grad's life. BIGBEN Server is the name for that shared foundation.
The Server Today
The server stopped at the same time and against the same backdrop as Radio Bigben and BIGBEN Search — in March 2007, when Georgi Georgiev left the Studentski Grad network. Today it remains a memory from a different era — of local networks, shared folders, FTP, and homegrown services on a single computer, before cloud services made all of it unnecessary.
Studentski Grad 