smbd purpose?

[Dr Robert Young]

With guidance from some people on the list, I was able to get the  
smbpasswd set correctly, and I can access my VMS directories now.  
However I have a question....

In my tinkering I had issued a TCPIP SET NOVERV SMBB as part of my  
efforts to "clean out" things between install attempts, and had not  
set it up to run again ( I forgot :- } )

TCPIP> show serv

Service             Port  Proto    Process           
Address            State

FTP                   21  TCP      TCPIP$FTP         
0.0.0.0             Enabled
LPD                  515  TCP      TCPIP$LPD         
0.0.0.0             Enabled
MOUNT                 10  TCP,UDP  TCPIP$MOUNTD      
0.0.0.0             Disabled
NFS                 2049  UDP      TCPIP$NFS         
0.0.0.0             Enabled
PCNFS               5151  TCP,UDP  TCPIP$PCNFSD      
0.0.0.0             Enabled
PORTMAPPER           111  TCP,UDP  TCPIP$PORTM       
0.0.0.0             Enabled
RDBSERVER            611  TCP      RDB71             
0.0.0.0             Disabled
TELNET                23  TCP      not defined       
0.0.0.0             Enabled
TCPIP>

However, samba is working just fine.  What is the purpose of the smbd  
service exactly???