The FASTBUS modular high speed data acquisition and control system for high energy physics and other applications was described by Costrell and Dawson at the 1983 Particle Accelerator Conference. Both the specification and the implementation of this interlaboratory development have progressed considerably since that time. Because of its many attractive features, FASTBUS is currently in use in several major nuclear and high energy physics laboratories and is also finding application in other areas. The initial impetus for the development of FASTBUS came from the high energy physics community, since demands placed upon data acquisition systems by experiments in high energy physics were clearly beyond the capability of existing systems. The experiments being planned involved data rates much higher than had previously been encountered and total events were increasing because of improved accelerator technology. These were accompanied by order-of-magnitude increases in the size and complexity of the associated detectors and particularly in the number of detector outputs that had to be expeditiously viewed and processed by the electronics. To meet this need for an extremely fast and versatile system, an interlaboratory effort was launched, resulting in the FASTBUS system.