lee@minnow.sp.unisys.com (Gene Lee) (05/21/91)
-- Gene Lee UUCP: ...!uunet!s5000!minnow!lee Unisys Corporation Phone: (612) 635-7147 CSNET: lee@minnow.SP.Unisys.Com If not for the courage of the fearless manager, the paycheck would be lost.
lee@minnow.sp.unisys.com (Gene Lee) (05/21/91)
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What is a FOSSIL driver? What is X00? Feel free to elaborate.
>--
Gene Lee UUCP: ...!uunet!s5000!minnow!lee
Unisys Corporation
Phone: (612) 635-7147 CSNET: lee@minnow.SP.Unisys.Com
If not for the courage of the fearless manager, the paycheck would be lost.
--
Gene Lee UUCP: ...!uunet!s5000!minnow!lee
Unisys Corporation
Phone: (612) 635-7147 CSNET: lee@minnow.SP.Unisys.Com
If not for the courage of the fearless manager, the paycheck would be lost.geoffw@xenitec.on.ca (Geoffrey Welsh) (05/23/91)
In article <1991May21.153404.26132@minnow.sp.unisys.com> lee@minnow.UUCP (Gene Lee) writes: >What is a FOSSIL driver? What is X00? Feel free to elaborate. FOSSIL stands for Fido/Opus/SEAdog Standard Interface Layer. The following story is a composite of information I have collected from various sources over my years in FidoNet. I don't guarantee its accuracy on all points, and many readers may be able to correct some of the errors (I wish they would, since I'm just as interested as anyone as to what the 'real' story is), but I hope that you will understand something of the FOSSIL by the time that you're finished reading: Once upon a time Wynn Wagner (the author of the Opus BBS software) grew quite frustrated with the Greenleaf communications library. As it happened, Tom Jennings (author of Fido and inventor of FidoNet) and Thom Henderson (author of SEAdog, an advanced FidoNet session driver et cetera) felt more or less the same way. Together, they formed the specification to a new MS-DOS extension which would use INT 14h (normally used by the BIOS to provide basic serial I/O) as its interface. It was a brilliant concept. Functions beyond what the BIOS could do were implemented (e.g. variable buffer sizes, being able to ask how many characters were waiting to be read, being able to transfer whole blocks as well as single bytes, etc.) and the FOSSIL could do a far better job than the BIOS would. It provided a major fringe benefit: the calling program neither knew nor cared what the serial I/O hardware looked like; it only knew that it was operating with a FOSSIL. Therefore, FOSSIL-based software could run on all MS-DOS machines, even if they were not PC-compatible - as long as someone wrote a FOSSIL to provide a standard interface to the non-standard hardware. One such MS-DOS machine with non-standard serial hardware is the DEC Rainbow; a FOSSIL for the Rainbow exists, permitting Rainbow owners to use the same software as those who own 100% PC-compatibles. Although the FOSSIL started out as a toolkit for serial I/O, its role has expanded to a general hardware interface driver: it provides access not only to the serial I/O hardware but also to anything for which DOS support is either poor or simply slow, such as the keyboard and screen. The FOSSIL specification includes the ability to load add-in drivers so that such things as the code to implement a chat between a BBS user and the SYSOP could be attached to the FOSSIL, allowing BBS operators to depart from the chat function as implemented in their favorite BBS software and in stead add their favorite FOSSIL CHAT extender... For the moment, most programs simply use the FOSSIL as a powerful and highly portable serial toolkit. Most software that is related to FidoNet (and many things, such as Tom Dell's Waffle software) use it as such, but a few take advantage of its advanced features... and I hope that it will become both the standard toolkit for serial I/O and a more powerful device for reducing hardware dependency.