  A large number of observations from the Parkes 64\,m-diameter radio
telescope, recorded with high time resolution, are publicly available. We have
re-processed all of the observations obtained during the first four years (from
1997 to 2001) of the Parkes Multibeam receiver system in order to identify
transient events and have built a database that records the 568,736,756 pulse
candidates generated during this search. We have discovered a new fast radio
burst (FRB), FRB~010305, with a dispersion measure of
350$\pm$5\,\,cm$^{-3}\,$pc and explored why so few FRBs have been discovered in
data prior to 2001. After accounting for the dispersion smearing across the
channel bandwidth and the sky regions surveyed, the number of FRBs is found to
be consistent with model predictions. We also present five single pulse
candidates from unknown sources, but with Galactic dispersion measures. We
extract a diverse range of sources from the database, which can be used, for
example, as a training set of data for new software being developed to search
for FRBs in the presence of radio frequency interference.
