Hi, FW.
I noticed you saying to All:
FW> This is perhaps a dumb question, but what is the
FW> definition of "fossil" as it applies to DOS or Windows?
>From memory, FOSSIL is an acronym for Fido-Opus-Seadog Serial Interface
Layer. Somebody tried to explain to me what a FOSSIL is for, once.
Fido refers to the original Fido BBS software. Opus and Seadog were
also early BBS programs from about the same era. There are still people
using those programs.
These days, after an awfully long time, serial ports look like serial
ports to computers & software. Everything's pretty much standardized.
Back In The Day, All kinds of people were making machines that were sort
of compatible with a PC. But they were all a little bit different.
Problem is, when you're writing software that uses the serial port
specifically, if you're writing for a lot of slightly different
machines, you need to write many different drivers for those machines.
You might even need to write whole different versions of the software,
just because the serial port services are all different.
BBS software, like Fido or Opus or Seadog, naturally uses the serial
port extremely heavily. If you can't make the serial port work right,
you can't make the BBS work right.
So somebody came up with the idea of a standardized "layer" to go
between the software and the serial port. I'd have a FOSSIL that works
on my sort of machine, you'd have one that works on yours. People who
write comms software simply write it to talk to the FOSSIL layer, which
looks the same on whatever machine.
Now stuff's a lot more standardized, but some software is still written
to talk to that same layer. Though it's not really necessary for the
original reason, there's new functionality built into some fossils now
-- like dealing with Digiboard-type cards that can provide maybe 8
serial ports, or accessing the serial port under Windows or OS/2 while
running DOS software, buffering, that sort of thing.
Hope that helps.
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