Ah... memories of technical arguments past. :-) Some clarification for those who might not be familiar: One way to illustrate the difference is to consider co

Ah... memories of technical arguments past. :-) Some clarification for those who might not be familiar: One way to illustrate the difference is to consider communicating with physical signal flags, where there's a limit to how fast you can raise and lower the flags. The baud rate is how fast you can change the flag. The bit rate is how fast the information flows. Say you have only a black flag and a white flag, and you let the black flag be 1 and the white flag 0. In this case, the baud rate and the bit rate are the same, as each flag transition represents 1 bit of information. Now suppose you have also have a red flag and a green flag. You could let white be 00, black be 01, red be 10, and green be 11. The baud rate (rate of running the flags up and down the pole) remains the same, but the bit rate (number of bits encoded by a flag) has doubled. Analog modems used all kinds of tricks to encode more than one bit on each symbol transition. Later models sometimes even had built-in data compression and error correction (e.g. the Telebit modems, which would actually simulate things like ZMODEM and UUCP g protocol to the computers, while using their own compression/correction mechanisms on the physical link).