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From a toy to an irc server..
The server avatar has been started as a project of a member of the ZID (centrum of informatics) at the University of Art, Linz. Its purpose was to gain experience with Linux. Another purpose was the exploration of possibilities of communication and communicative behaviour on the net. The project has been started in winter 1997.
The services of avatar have then been offered to students of other, less well-equipped Austrian organisations. At that time about 100 users were using services such as telnet, ftp, www, email and irc.
At the end of march 1998 there have been a few complaints of foreign institutions: an ungrateful user of avatar had tried to break into other computer systems via avatar. Because of that all non-administrative users were removed from avatar.
At that time an irc server was installed on avatar. After a successfull test operation it has then been linked to IRCNet.
As a stable, reliable and fast server, under permanent professional administration by an adminstrative team avatar has then allowed thousands of people to connect to the IRC network.
By that way, avatar has been the only irc server in Linz after irc.uni-linz.ac.at got closed down in 1996 for various reasons.
Since August 2001 avatar supports ipv6, the ip addressing system of the future, as the first Austrian IRCNet server (see "ipv6 project").
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