Good Morning, Karl -

About that message on 11-14-1998 from Karl Schneider to All:

 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.

It's a standardized application program interface for DOS that
contains com port and screen drivers, freeing the mailer or BBS
from the necessity of handling interrupts and screen translations.
Think of it as an extension to DOS that probably should have been
there in the first place.

When the BBS wants to write to the screen, it doesn't have to
care whether the screen is the local memory-mapped video card
or a terminal emulator on the other end of the phone. Same with
the com ports - it doesn't need to worry about what interrupt
or IO address the caller is on.

OS/2 obviates the need for a fossil by providing a communications
layer between the device drivers and the application which does
exactly the above.

Best,
  dave

rooter{at}nisa.net

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