s-link started in 1995 in response to problems collecting data from the new atlas experiment at cern. atlas was extensively instrumented with stand-alone computers, which sent data via a variety of methods to be collected on various servers. s-link was seen as a way to provide a single mechanism for forwarding the data from the collection to the link hardware with extremely low latency. generally the s-link hardware provided functionality that would normally be provided by networking (or other) drivers running on the host cpu, thereby tying up cycles and introducing delays.