Notator.org timeline
         --------------------
     
* August 1997
The Notator mailing list is born after many months of searching for 
a suitable (free) list-server host.
CoolList (http://www.coollist.com) was finally found and used to 
start the list. 
Messages were posted to several Atari ST and synth/MIDI related groups 
which resulted in a steady increase of list-members.


* February 7, 1998 (the opening day of the 1998 olympics in Nagano, Japan)
CoolList turned out not to be as reliable as we hoped for. 
Messages were lost or delayed to mention a couple of problems. 
We needed a new (and more reliable) host.
A list member had heard about a free mailing-list service in Austria 
called "Forfree.at" (http://www.forfree.at).
This was a professionaly run 'Majordomo' system and we saw a 
significant improvement over the old system.


* December 19, 1998
An organization called ListQuest (http://www.listquest.com) in Halifax, 
Canada offers to archive messages from the mailing list for free.
With help from existing list members, getting a complete up-to-date 
archive is possible. A search-form is added to the Notator website. 


* June 4, 2000
Forfree.at announce that their free services will soon cease to exist. 
Since the list had been run without any form of financial aid, the future 
of the list looked rather dark for a while.
Fortunately things worked out as a list-member in Auckland, New Zealand 
with access to an Internet server offered to host the list free of charge, 
again on a 'Majordomo' list system.


* August 20, 2001
The location for the website has up to now changed almost half a dozen 
times due to the fact that the many free locations haven't been up to 
standard in addition to the many advertising banners. 
The final location was at Crosswinds (http://www.crosswinds.net) because 
they offered free hosting with unlimited disk space and no advertising.
However, the rules changed. Annoying advertisement pop-ups began to show 
up, and features making it easy to update the site was being made available 
only to paying customers. It was time for a change.

A proposal by the list-owner was made to the list: should a new website 
set up, and in addition a domain-name, for a permanent address be created?
Since this would cost money, who would pay for it? Would everybody 
help out a little bit, would only the most active users pay or should 
it cost money to join the list?
The result was that several members of the list wanted to help out 
financially, so the domain name "notator.org" was created. 
The actual hosting of the website and domain name servers was offered 
freely by a couple of list members.

 
* September 2, 2001
The domain name technicalities and setup of the new website is completed. 
The old site is being redirected to the new one which is: 
   http://www.notator.org    or     http://notator.org


* February 10, 2002
The search-engine is complete, making it possible for anyone to search 
through any of the previous messages dating back all the way to 
August 1997 when the list was started!
The search engine is engineered in such a way that email addresses 
have been mangled to prevent them from being abused by spammers (junk-mail).  


* August 20, 2004
The website and the mailing list comes to a sudden standstill because of a 
domain name problem. After a while we find alternative ways of keeping the 
mailing list active.


* October 13, 2004
The domain name is active again, meaning that the website and mailing list 
works as before.


* August 2007
Notator.org has its 10 year anniversary