Our little team has been through a LOT since we started up in 2001.  Below is a highlight of the significant points, and we have had many!  Read, enjoy...

There wasn't much in the beginning!  I (Zain) personally started crunching for seti on Fri Feb 16 12:13:35 2001 UTC.  At that time I didn't know ANYONE else crunching... and was amazed that so many people around the world (well over 2.5M accounts) knew about it and I didn't!

I had a look around, did lots of searching on the web about SETI, and decided to make a team up for the residential college I live at (still).  The college is called "Flinders University Hall", catering for 240+ students that attend Flinders University.

So the team was created, and the first2 members were myself and Rob Perkins.  Some of the staff were keen to join up when I told them (or more so I twisted their arm), and then some of the students living in the college heard of it and joined as well.

It wasn't long before I got onto the idea of making a TINY web page for our team.  Just 1 or two pages, a few links to SETI and some of the team stats.  Nothing fancy.

Here is the VERY first post about out site...

Can you believe it!  200 work units! *hehehehe*

Mid March, and it wasn't long before I got in the swing of things and created our own profiles section.  They were an instant hit, and still are today.  Our First BIG BIG member joined us late in March, Ninth, who at that stage had just under 10K work units!  I wrote to him after looking around his web site and posting him a little email asking if he would be interested. A great guy he is... and a AMAZING cruncher.

It wasn't long before we outgrew our name "Flinders University Hall", as many many members were joining up from Flinders University, and ALL over the world.  We changed our name to "Flinders University", and crashed into the TOP 200 University teams by 10th April!  Looking back now we rose SO quickly!

Two other features were also started up way back in April 2001.  Member Gaussians... at that stage just a top 20 list based on Signal Ratio, and Subgroups.  Both these two features prove to be amazingly popular with our team members, with emails coming in each week about them.

Over the next few months we grew quickly, and reached many targets.

By 1st June 2001 we had hit 50,000 work units! and our 100th Member joined later in June!  It was a great time for expansion, and even though our site was still small our members seemed to love it.

The URL of our eccentrix site was something that always bothered me, so I looked around for a FREE site with nice features and a decent URL.  I eventually came across what was at that stage a GREAT little host called www.vr9.com.  They are now DEAD, but for a year they were our host and our web site was seti.vr9.com.  A nice ring to it... and lots of little features including full remote FTP which came in very handy.

Well I was SO eagerly awaiting the 100K work unit mark, our team was still growing nicely and we crashed through the mark mid September.  But considering what was going on at the time I didn't really feel like celebrating, as did others in our team.  Here is the post the day we hit 100K

So we crunched on quietly for a while, passing 200 members on November 11th 2001.  The sky seemed the limit, but now had SO MANY people that weren't anything to do with Flinders University it was starting to play with my head.  People were bringing friends and family from all around the world to our team, which is GREAT, and I still love it... but the name didn't really reflect that which was a shame.  It set the seed of a decision into my mind.

Between November 2001 and March 2002 we were in a bit of a status quo.  Members sending in Gaussians, Profiles, Subgroups... inviting more members, growing nicely.  By March 1st we had members from 30 countries around the world!  Something to be very proud of I think.

It wasn't long before we SMASHED in the top 200 teams of ALL SETI and we eventually did it with this day:

25th April 2002 and our team site went down!  I had no idea why, and after 9 days was getting REALLY worried about it.  As it turns out VR9 had decided to just STOP hosting and didn't tell ANY of their hosts.  This meant I had to find us a new site and quickly!

My sister came to the rescue and let me host our site at www.skifalls.com.  A nice little site for some snow ski apartments in the mountains in Victoria Australia.  So we moved to there and we started cruising again.

By 1st May we SMASHED 200,000 Work Units and had well over 300 members!  With all the disruption to our site, and moving hosts, we had been left with a URL I wasn't happy with.  It was the last straw, and right then I decided that if our members wanted it we would change name, buy a nice URL and move FORWARD into the SETI future.

Early May 2002, and a BIG leap forward.  A big thankyou to IronBits and Jing Wee for allowing us to have copies of their CGI scripts to work out and display GREAT HOURLY updated EXTENDED stats on all our team members.  Both members deserve a mention of their web pages:

• http://www.setiatwork.com - Jing Wee's site

• http://www.dbestern.net - IronBits's site

So much happened in May 2002 for our team.  We had over 50 suggestions from members for our new team name.  I selected 27 and let the members vote for their top 5.  The options were...

• The One and Only SETI Team [suggestion from Pekka]

• Hardcore Signal Seekers [suggestion from Pekka]

• New Explorers [suggestion from Alainus]

• Superly Aggravated Alien Munchers [suggestion from WillyWalloo]

• Alien Investigator's [suggestion from WillyWalloo]

• Global Online Network of Enthusiasts [suggestion from Tigrrr]

• Global Online ALliance [suggestion from Tigrrr]

• World Internet Seti Enthusiasts [suggestion from Tigrrr]

• Zain's Alien Intelligence Network [suggestion from Tigrrr]

• Flinders International Collaboration of Deep Space Explorers [suggestion from ~Iceman~]

• Flinders International Collaboration of Extraterrestrial Intelligence Seekers [suggestion from ~Iceman~]

• We Crunch Harder Than a Hungry Troll [suggestion from SigilScythe]

• International Collaboration Of SETI Crunchers [suggestion from SigilScythe]

• Our Team Name Is Cooler Than Yours [suggestion from SigilScythe]

• So Long, And Thanks For All The Signals [suggestion from SigilScythe]

• SETI Stole My Teddy Bear [suggestion from SigilScythe]

• SETI.echo.ET.echo.SETI [suggestion from Elem103]

• SETI Synergy [suggestion from Elem103]

• Terran SETI HQ [suggestion from Chardor]

• Universal SETI HQ [suggestion from Chardor]

• Flinders Universe Searcherz [suggestion from Bob Staples]

• Stella Specto [suggestion from Bob Staples]

• New SETI World Order [suggestion from Wyzzard]

• Terrans of Planet SETI (TOPS) [suggestion from Wyzzard]

• SETI Enthusiasts [suggestion from Zain]

• World SETI Hardcore Crunchers [suggestion from Zain]

Great suggestions ALL of them, and voting took about a week.  The results came in, and there was actually a TIE for 5th place with 3 names.  So we took 7 names to our final round of voting to chose our FINAL team name...  The contenders and results were:

• 25 Votes - SETI Synergy

• 18 Votes - World Internet Seti Enthusiasts

• 17 Votes - International Collaboration Of SETI Crunchers

• 14 Votes - So Long, And Thanks For All The Signals

• 11 Votes - New SETI World Order

• 10 Votes - Flinders International Collaboration of Extraterrestrial Intelligence Seekers

• 10 Votes - Zain's Alien Intelligence Network

So SETI Synergy it is.  A great name I think.  I bought us a URL, got us a NEW forum, built a NEW menu system, and the site is looking BETTER than ever!

So that is up until now.  We are PROUD to crunch for SETI, proud that we have members from ALL over the world, and hope that one day we can make the top 10, maybe even #1.

Synergy - the overall effort is greater than the sum of the individual efforts.