Big Brother (alias BB) was a tool for systems and network monitoring, generally used by system administrators. The advent of the dynamic web page allowed Big Brother to be one of the first monitoring systems to use the web as its user interface. Prior to this, monitoring tools were generally console based, or required graphic terminals such as X Window to operate. Big Brother produces HTML pages containing a simple matrix of hosts and tests with red and green dots to denote system status. Big Brother was named after George Orwell's character Big Brother from his novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. E-mail from Big Brother originated from the Ministry of Truth, and users of the software were called Brothers.