X00 was a popular DOS-based

FOSSIL A fossil (from Classical Latin , ) is any preserved remains, impression, or trace of any once-living thing from a past geological age. Examples include bones, shells, exoskeletons, stone imprints of animals or microbes, objects preserved ...

driver which was commonly used in the mid-1980s to the late 1990s and is even still used today. FOSSIL drivers were mainly used to run

BBS BBS may refer to: Ammunition * BBs, BB gun metal bullets * BBs, airsoft gun plastic pellets Computing and gaming * Bulletin board system, a computer server users dial into via dial-up or telnet; precursor to the Internet * BIOS Boot Specificat ...

software under

MS-DOS MS-DOS ( ; acronym for Microsoft Disk Operating System, also known as Microsoft DOS) is an operating system for x86-based personal computers mostly developed by Microsoft. Collectively, MS-DOS, its rebranding as IBM PC DOS, and a few oper ...

. X00 can also be run under

Windows Windows is a group of several proprietary graphical operating system families developed and marketed by Microsoft. Each family caters to a certain sector of the computing industry. For example, Windows NT for consumers, Windows Server for ...

, or even

Linux Linux ( or ) is a family of open-source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged as a Linux distribution, which i ...

and DOSEMU environments, to allow FOSSIL-aware MS-DOS based applications to function. X00 was developed by Raymond L. Gwinn from 1989 until 1993. The final release version was version 1.50, with a later beta version 1.53 which added support for baud rates above 38400. X00 is free for non-commercial usage. X00 included many enhancements to th
FTSC
FOSSIL revision 5 specifications, which were later used in other FOSSIL drivers such as ADF and

NetFoss NetFoss is a popular Network FOSSIL driver for Windows. A FOSSIL is a serial communications layer to allow DOS based software to talk to modems without dealing with hardware I/O and interrupts. A Network FOSSIL redirects such software to a TCP/IP ...

. Gwinn moved on to develop a replacement serial port driver for

OS/2 OS/2 (Operating System/2) is a series of computer operating systems, initially created by Microsoft and IBM under the leadership of IBM software designer Ed Iacobucci. As a result of a feud between the two companies over how to position OS/2 ...

called

SIO Sio may refer to: Places * Sió, an artificial channel in Hungary * Siø, a small Danish island in the South Funen Archipelago * Sio, Burkina Faso, a village in Burkina Faso * Sio, Mali, a commune in Mali * Sio, Papua New Guinea, a town in ...

. SIO contained a virtualized FOSSIL (VX00) that could be loaded if applications needed FOSSIL support.

References

Device drivers FOSSIL {{network-software-stub