this post was submitted on 15 Aug 2023
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I don't remember kilobaud being a word. I only remember it being a word that was misused for some reason. Or maybe just disfavored against an actual unit. Like it was equivalent to like some small unit, and got outgrown quickly.
Like when going from bits per second to kilobits per second, I think hair was a single word that meant bits per second, but was not a literal unit, so kilobaud didn't make sense, whereas kilobits did.
At least that's how I remember it off hand, could be wrong.
Baud rate is the maximum number of transitions per second of the state of a transmission medium. Hz is the actual number of cycles per second, so it varies degending on the data transmitted. Bitrate is the number of bits transmitted per second.
Usually bits are transmitted in groups with some redundancy to allow errors to be corrected. E.g. early Ethernet used 8b/10b encoding; 8 bits of data were transmitted as a 10 bit "symbol".
With a 1b/1b encoding baud rate would equal bit rate, but in practice that was essentially never used so the numbers woud diverge. Bitrate is more meaningful to the user.
SI and binary prefixes can be applied to baud, so kilobaud is certainly a word.
It may have been misused at some point, but "baud" was a word long before the internet, and I distinctly remember my modem at the time using the word baud on the box. I was just a teenager, so I'm sure I was missing key information. It was used, tho.
Here, this is proving us both right:
Kilobaud is definitely a word that means a thing. Baud is a literal unit of measure that uses the metric prefixes.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯