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]
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