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Jedd | 1 month ago

As someone that started with 300/300 and went via 1200/75 to 9600 etc - I don't believe conflating signalling changes with bps is an indication of physical or temporal proximity.

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drzaiusx11|1 month ago

I think it was a joke implying you'd be old enough to forget because of age, which in my case is definitely true...

Jedd|1 month ago

Oh, I got the implication, but I think it was such a common mistake back then, that I don't think it's age-related now - it's a bit of a trope, to assume baud and bps mean the same thing, and people tend to prefer to use a more technical term even when it's not fully understood. Hence we are where we are with terms like decimate, myriad, nubile, detox etc, forcefully redefined by common (mis)usage. I need a cup of tea, clearly.

Anyway, I didn't think my throw-away comment would engender such a large response. I guess we're not the only olds around here!

da_chicken|1 month ago

No, just that confusing the two was ubiquitous at the time 14.4k, 28k, and 56k modems were the standard.

Like it was more common than confusing Kbps and KBps.

I mean, the 3.5" floppy disk could store 1.44 MB... and by that people meant the capacity was 1,474,560 bytes = 1.44 * 1024 * 1000. Accuracy and consistency in terminology has never been particularly important to marketing and advertising, except marketing and advertising is exactly where most laypersons first learn technical terms.