has anyone ever utilized a fossil driver?

You wrote... Eh, not sure that's quite the right way to look at it, but in the final analysis, yes. In the early days of PC's, the bios services to talk to the communications port were painful and unreliable, especially at then higher speeds. Not always standard either, so comms/bbs programs could have trouble running on a given platform at all, or even if so - not well. So the "Fossil" driver was created. It was a serial port driver that spoke directly to the underlying hardware (8250 registers) on one side, and presented an efficient standard API to the other side. So it was really created for performance reasons, but it had an additional effect of allowing coms programs to run on hardware that the fossil driver supported and the coms program didn't (as long as the coms program supported the fossil API). Jay West