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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