mos_8502 :verified: on Nostr: This one is for the young, and the non-techies. So what, exactly, is the difference ...
This one is for the young, and the non-techies.
So what, exactly, is the difference between "baud rate" and "bits per second"? Well, they both refer to the same physical thing, data being transmitted, but "baud" as a unit of measure only counts symbols transmitted per second, while a "bit" can only be a zero or one, on or off -- an octal transmission system like a parallel port has 256 symbols (that is, 256 possible value states at any one moment in time), but can still be measured in baud.
In the case of serial data transmission, baud can be thought of as the "raw" bitrate -- that is, how many times per second a high or low gets transmitted on the physical line. However, because of the way serial transmissions usually work, the actual data bitrate is less than the baud rate -- start and stop bits, and parity bits, or line codes like eight-to-fourteen modulation mean that for every n bits of actual data transmitted, n+x symbols have to be transmitted.
So what, exactly, is the difference between "baud rate" and "bits per second"? Well, they both refer to the same physical thing, data being transmitted, but "baud" as a unit of measure only counts symbols transmitted per second, while a "bit" can only be a zero or one, on or off -- an octal transmission system like a parallel port has 256 symbols (that is, 256 possible value states at any one moment in time), but can still be measured in baud.
In the case of serial data transmission, baud can be thought of as the "raw" bitrate -- that is, how many times per second a high or low gets transmitted on the physical line. However, because of the way serial transmissions usually work, the actual data bitrate is less than the baud rate -- start and stop bits, and parity bits, or line codes like eight-to-fourteen modulation mean that for every n bits of actual data transmitted, n+x symbols have to be transmitted.