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The whole megabits/gigabits thing seems like a holdover from when internet speed was measured in bits. Not kilobits, but bits. 300 baud (bits/sec) modems and th
by colejohnson66 6y ago
The whole megabits/gigabits thing seems like a holdover from when internet speed was measured in bits. Not kilobits, but bits. 300 baud (bits/sec) modems and the like. When 1200 baud was reached, no one wanted to be the one to switch to a “lower” number of ~150 bytes/sec.
EDIT: baud is not exactly the same as bits/second. But in those times, it was pretty much the same. https://stackoverflow.com/questions/20534417/what-is-the-difference-between-baud-rate-and-bit-rate https://stackoverflow.com/questions/20534417/what-is-the-dif...
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 6y agobaud and bps are not actually the same thing, although in the era of 300 baud they may as well have been.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- mdeck_ 6y agoThis may be a historical explanation, but it also seems a tacit agreement with the point above, when it says “no one wanted to be the one to switch to a ‘lower’ number.” No one measures anything in kilobits or megabits today (nor has for decades)—except ISPs measuring the speeds they promise to customers.
- jl6 6y agoSure they do - nearly all networking gear is sold by bits/sec, e.g. gigabit Ethernet, 10Gb Ethernet, and so on. Media encoding also commonly uses bit rates, e.g. 320kbps MP3.
- mdeck_ 6y agoYour networking equipment example goes to the same point. Why do I care how many bits are transferring per second? I don’t. I want to know bytes, since everything on my computer is measured in bytes. Regarding media encoding, there I’m less sure. I guess those values were originally in small enough absolute values, and have not continued to climb exponentially, such that measuring in bits maybe continues to make sense. Anyway, thanks for sharing those examples.