Hi Karl,

 KS> Aside from the fact that I'm rapidly approaching 'fossil' status
 KS> myself, I still haven't managed to figure out just what it means with
 KS> respect to communications.

Ok, from one "nearly a Fossil" to another.......;-), I will try a
quick history of what a FOSSIL is.

The term FOSSIL is actually an acronym for "Fido Opus Seadog Serial
Interface Layer". Fido, Opus and Seadog were early (circa 1985) BBS
programs to implement what was essentially a BBS. The most common OS
available (if you can really call it that), was good old DOS, however DOS
did NOT include a standard S/W interface for the Serial Port, and some H/W
platforms (such as the DEC Rainbow) implemented Serial Ports slightly
different to the PC standard.

Because people wanted to use each program on a variety of different
platforms, the FOSSIL "standard" was devised to provide the BBS
code with a standard method of talking to the Serial Port H/W on each of
the different H/W platforms, all you needed was a FOSSIL for YOUR
particular platform.

As it turned out, the PC H/W platform ended up with fairly standard Serial
ports in H/W and thereby the BIOS support for them, but the functionality
of the FOSSIL far surpassed the capabilities of what was available in the
BIOS of each machine.

Effectively, a FOSSIL is a type of DOS DRIVER for the serial port, that
allows full interrupt driven I/O to take place. If you run Windows, OS/2 or
any version of *nix, they all provide a Serial Port Device Driver to
provide a standard method of access to the H/W, however the FOSSIL was
around before all these arrived and provided more functionality specific to
the use required for Fidonet. In many cases, the BBS programs used on these
platforms dont need a FOSSIL, because they all provide an enhanced Serial
Port interface within the OS.

I hope this helps explain what a FOSSIL is................pk.


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