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The network had more than one supervisor running, but only one was
active, the others being put to sleep with "sleeping pill" messages. If the
active supervisor went down, all the others would wake up and battle for
control of the network. After the battle, the supervisor with the highest
pre-set priority would dominate, and the network would then again be
controlled by only one supervisor. (During the takeover battle, the net
consisted of subsets of itself across which new circuits could not be
built). Existing circuits were not affected by supervisor switches.
There was a clever scheme to switch the echoing function between the
local node and the host based on whether or not a special character had
been typed by the user. Data transfers were also possible via "auxiliary
circuits".