fossil
n. 1. In software, a misfeature that becomes
understandable only in historical context, as a remnant of times
past retained so as not to break compatibility. Example: the
retention of octal as default base for string escapes in C, in
spite of the better match of hexadecimal to ASCII and modern
byte-addressable architectures. See dusty deck. 2. More
restrictively, a feature with past but no present utility.
Example: the force-all-caps (LCASE) bits in the V7 and BSD
UNIX tty driver, designed for use with monocase terminals. (In a
perversion of the usual backward-compatibility goal, this
functionality has actually been expanded and renamed in some later
USG UNIX releases as the IUCLC and OLCUC bits.) 3. The FOSSIL
(Fido/Opus/Seadog Standard Interface Level) driver specification
for serial-port access to replace the brain-dead routines in
the IBM PC ROMs. Fossils are used by most MS-DOS BBS software
in preference to the `supported' ROM routines, which do not support
interrupt-driven operation or setting speeds above 9600; the use of
a semistandard FOSSIL library is preferable to the bare metal
serial port programming otherwise required. Since the FOSSIL
specification allows additional functionality to be hooked in,
drivers that use the hook but do not provide serial-port
access themselves are named with a modifier, as in `video
fossil'.
