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Baud vs. bits

Some of the comments are funny: "The article is a little confusing. Baud rate is the character rate, Bit rate is the bit rate." :)
BTW, my favorite modem back then was the Telebit Trailblazer. Alas, I could never afford one.
 
The baud vs. bps argument sounds so quaint, compared to how the politically correct Wikipedia hipsters insist that we must now say "kibibyte" when talking about a unit of 1024 bytes and "mebibyte" when talking about a unit of 1,048,576 bytes -- redefining a 70-year history of computer science just because hard drive manufacturers decided to cheat and make their drives seem larger than they actually are, by using decimal multipliers instead of binary multipliers.
 
To a telecom engineer the distinction is/was very real. "symbols per second", where a symbol can represent more than one bit is very different from "bits per second". Much like the distinction of saying "cents per second" and "coins per second" when you're trying to value the time wasted pondering such delicacies.
 
The Bell 103 standard was both 300 bps and 300 baud, and since it remained the baseline even as more and more faster speeds were being added, it led people into thinking that baud and bps were equivalent at the faster speeds, too.

Even today, for the 1.5 million or so people in the USA still using dialup Internet, their modern "56K" V.90 or V.92 modems still do the initial handshaking with the host using FSK at 300 bps/baud:

http://hackadaycom.files.wordpress.com/2013/01/dial-up-handshake-infographic.png
 
Chuck(G) said:
Sure, but the hair starts rising on the back of my neck when I hear "2400 baud modem"... :)
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"Baud" is a lot easier to say than "bits per second" or "BPS" -- that alone is probably a lot of the reason why the term (incorrectly) remained in use for the faster speeds. Also, a lot of computer enthusiasts were/are also ham radio operators, and amateur radio uses FSK Baudot code for RTTY (Radio Teletype), so perhaps there was some crossover from that terminology as well.
 
Technically what hams use is not Baudot code at least in its original incarnation--it's a variation of Donald Murray's modification of Baudot (Murray code). (Yet another kiwi innovation :) )

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Murray_(inventor)

But "baud" has little to do with Baudot code--it's an honorific name for the unit of symbols/second. (cf. "farad" for Michael Faraday, who did not invent the capacitor. If we named units after their inventors, we'd be valuing capacitors by their "vonKleists" or "vanMusschenbroeks".)

So why don't people say "bips" for "bits per second"? They don't have any problem with saying 'mips" for million instructions per second.
 
Chuck(G) said:
...So why don't people say "bips" for "bits per second"? They don't have any problem with saying 'mips" for million instructions per second.
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You're tilting at windmills, Chuck; might as well try to convince folks to call DB9s DA9s while you're at it, not to mention the whole RJ-xx connector mess, etc. etc.

Interesting article though.
 
Chuck(G) said:
Sure, but the hair starts rising on the back of my neck when I hear "2400 baud modem"... :)
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but but.. the 2400 bps modems I used back in the day _were_ 2400 baud modems. However, the 9600 bps modem (top of the line, came later) that I used was _also_ a 2400 baud modem, just with more efficient encoding of bits.

-Tor
 
Chuck(G) said:
Really? Was that some sort of Euro convention? Here, 2400 bps (V.22) modems were QAM with a symbol rate of 600 baud.
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It seems to me that we used to say "2400 baud" around here, regardless of correctness. So to refresh my mind (ya, right), I just checked a couple of vintage records on my computer and a Cardinal magazine advertisement from 1991 is very careful to use "bps" in all references. However, I see a 1999 Compute Magazine ad from some vendor has this price list:

Code: 
Cardinal:
 MB1250 INT 1200 Baud                . $49.95
 MB1200 EX EXT 1200 Baud .           . $88.95
 MB2450 tNT 2400 Baud ....... . $79.95
 MB2400EX EXT 2400 Baud .. ... $99.95
 MB2250F MNP level 5 ...... . . $119.95
 2450 MNP level 5 INT 2400 baud $139.95
 2400 MNP level 5 EXT 2400 baudS159.95

Actually, now that I come to think of it, I vaguely recall the "baud" discussion back then and the sales world didn't care. They were talking product. Nothing else mattered to them.
 
MikeS said:
You're tilting at windmills, Chuck; might as well try to convince folks to call DB9s DA9s while you're at it, not to mention the whole RJ-xx connector mess, etc. etc.
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And anything smaller than an 8-inch floppy disk is supposed to be a "diskette", not a "disk".
 
Hmmm, actually 8" are the "Diskettes" (I have a bunch with that name proudly displayed on them). After that, terminology gets a little confused. "Minifloppy" for the 5.25" and "Microfloppy" for the 3.5" have been used, as well as "Minidisk" and "Microdisk".
 
In the '90s I heard people referring to 3.5-inch diskettes as "hard disks", because logically speaking, they are hard, not floppy. :)

And nowadays, quite a few people refer to their computer's entire system unit (the box on their desk or floor) as the "hard drive".

That goes hand-in-hand with all the people (and companies!) who refer to the wheels on cars as "rims" (when in fact, the rim is just the outer edge of the wheel -- a wheel consists of the rim, spokes, and hub).
 
Ole Juul said:
[Actually, now that I come to think of it, I vaguely recall the "baud" discussion back then and the sales world didn't care. They were talking product. Nothing else mattered to them.
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If they were sales people, I'd be surprised if they didn't spell it "bawd", as in "That's a real bawdy modem--it's got 2400 of ' em in there..." :)
 
vwestlife said:
In the '90s I heard people referring to 3.5-inch diskettes as "hard disks", because logically speaking, they are hard, not floppy. :)
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I remember other kids being confused about why we called the floppy disks back in elementary and middle school. In some computer class we had, they opened one to show us the floppy part inside. Reminds me of this: Strong Bad Email #143: Technology



My mom always calls a computer's case the CPU. The computer terminals they used to use at her office (for a credit union), were referred to by everyone there as CRTs for some reason, despite them being complete machines from her description.

And always remember:

Disk: Magnetic storage medium
Disc: Optical storage medium

However, most folks won't notice the difference.
 
CommodoreKid said:
I remember other kids being confused about why we called the floppy disks back in elementary and middle school. In some computer class we had, they opened one to show us the floppy part inside.
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I guess that's the plastics generation. The 3.5" diskettes are actually quite soft - on the outside as well. Try bending one. I think that anything you can bend by hand should be called soft. I can imagine that if the trend keeps going the way it is, even pudding will be called "hard". :p

My mom always calls a computer's case the CPU. The computer terminals they used to use at her office (for a credit union), were referred to by everyone there as CRTs for some reason, despite them being complete machines from her description.
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CRT refers to "cathode ray tube". That's what most screens were up until recently and was the common reference for monitor, and loosely even to console.

And always remember:

Disk: Magnetic storage medium
Disc: Optical storage medium

However, most folks won't notice the difference.
Click to expand...

Wow, that's a new one! Have a look at how the rest of the world looks at it. :) :)
 
Ole Juul said:
CRT refers to "cathode ray tube". That's what most screens were up until recently and was the common reference for monitor
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REALLY?!?!? [/sarcasm]

Like I said, she would refer to the entire computer as such. I would always ask about why she called the whole ensemble a name that I associated only with monitor's, but she insisted that CRT was just the name her office used. So I was correcting her about it since I was little, because I understood what it stood for.

For example: "I need to look up this member's information on my CRT" or "Yeah, the keyboard stopped working on my CRT, so I called somebody from the service desk to come fix it." From the sound of it, this was during the mid-late 80's and early 90's and this was her first real interaction with a computer. She didn't really have access to one at home until I got my first desktop when I was 7, and she shared it with me for a number of years. Now my mom complains about the low-grade Dell machines with cheap keyboards they use in her office, and replace parts on all too often.

Ole Juul said:
Wow, that's a new one! Have a look at how the rest of the world looks at it. :) :)
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How did you spell it? Everyone I went to college with seemed to either use them interchangeably, or stick just use "disc". I think that might have to do with CD's being significantly more familiar to folks I know, and therefore the compact disc logo being their reference.
 
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