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'.
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