abstract A real-time digital seismic event detection and recording system has been developed for the MIT Seismic Network. The system has been designed specifically for an environment of low natural seismic activity and for surface stations which are often influenced by weather conditions and cultural noise. The system runs on an HP-1000 computer and can handle up to 16 channels of short- and long-period data. The structure of the system centers around the event detectors, one for short-period data and one for long-period data. These detectors base their decisions on a metric computed from the Walsh transform of the data. This allows them to detect changes in the amplitude of the waveform as well as frequency shifts. Detections at several stations are correlated to prevent glitches from triggering the detector. Present operation successfully saves those events that are large enough for analysis and leaves 23 of the computer available for general timesharing use.