fossil

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".

[Jargon File]