The main idea of the design was that there can be several readout programs, and one collector . It scans through its pipe table as specified in setup text files. It formats the subevents from the pipes into buffer streams . The event server optionally copies events from the buffers into TCP sockets of connected analysis clients. The communication was local on the master .
Commands are input to a dispatcher program and then routed to the task executing the command.
The Single Branch of SBS was simply one memory mapped into the VSB address space. The MBS allows now to specify non contiguous memory locations for pipes. When the required hardware connections are there, the subsystems can be run independently, or can be bound to one single data stream by just load the appropriate setup files and start the appropriate programs. To control several nodes from one terminal MBS provides a new program, the prompter. This program starts SBS dispatchers and message loggers on remote nodes.