Killing the messenger. The litigation support was part of an extended trial concerning the construction of the Bay Area Rapid Transit system, BART. Another interesting feature of this study was the repercussions felt by Blair and Maron: While they are careful to say that their very negative conclusions (concerning the Recall levels achieved) “. . . would be problems with any large-scale full-text retrieval system, and in this sense our study should not be seen as a critique of STAIRS alone,” IBM took the criticism very personally. “Big Blue” was very much the Microsoft of this era, and both Blair and Maron were made to feel quite uncomfortable.