FOSSIL

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

For other uses of the term, see Fossil (disambiguation)

FOSSIL is a standard for allowing serial communication for telecommunications programs under the DOS operating system. FOSSIL is an acronym for Fido Opus Seadog Standard Interface Layer.

A "FOSSIL" driver is simply a communications device driver. They exist because in the early days of Fidonet, computer hardware was very diverse and there were no standards on how software was to communicate with the serial interface hardware. Initial development of FidoBBS only worked on a specific type of machine. Before FidoBBS could start spreading, it was seen that a uniform method of communicating with serial interface hardware was needed if the software was going to be used on other machines. This need was also apparent for other communications based software. The FOSSIL specification was born so as to provide this uniform method. Software using the FOSSIL standard could communicate using the same interrupt functions no matter what hardware it was running on.

FOSSIL drivers were specific to the hardware they were run on because each was written to fit specifically to the serial interface hardware of that platform. FOSSIL drivers became more well known with the spread of IBM PC compatible machines. These machines ran some form of DOS (Disk Operating System) and their BIOS provided very poor support for serial communications—so poor that it fell far short of the needs of any non-trivial communications task. over time, MS-DOS and PC-DOS became the prevalent operating systems and PC compatible hardware became predominant.

Two popular DOS based FOSSIL drivers were X00 and BNU. A popular Windows based FOSSIL driver is NetFoss, which is freeware.