Len,

I doubt anyone can read 120 characters per *second*. The need for more and
more speed is being pushed by the desire to send more visually 'appealing'
information. What once was typed into a memo and posted on a bulletin board
("come celebrate Dave's 30 years with the company") in a couple of minutes
has now evolved into a 30 minute or more procedure with the word processor
and all the pretty graphics. It is then passed to the employees as a 100K
file (maybe 500K if Dave's picture is included) via intranet within the
company. This might be nice enough, but is unnecessary information. This
gets much more interesting when someone passes along a virus alert - which
gets forwarded and forwarded ... you get the idea Heck, we used to get
warnings over the company computer about forwarding such stuff.

Mostly, the great advances in communication have resulted in more visual
information being passed. At times, porn is involved. I'm not suggesting
that the higher speed is bad, it certainly isn't. I am suggesting that a
lot of communication going on now might well be described as "bloatware".

Come to think of it, one is safer if you've set your reader to 'text only'
for receive. I wonder why ...
(ps - it is also a good idea to send only plain text. If only plain text
were sent, 1200 baud would be a darn good clip.)


73 from Rochester, NY
Jim AA2QA

"Len Over 21" wrote in message
...
"1200 baud" (actually 1200 bits per second) is about equivalent to
1200 words per minute as by:

1200 bps = 120 characters per second at 10 bits per character in
the ASCII 8-level character coding commonly used now.
120 characters per second = 7200 characters per minute.
If one "word" consists of 5 text characters plus a space character
(a common measure of throughput in telegraphy the century
before the last one), then 7200 char/min = 1200 words/min.

If the average "fast" radiotelegraphy rate is 20 words/minute,
then "1200 baud" is SIX HUNDRED TIMES FASTER than
average "CW."

Given the two vastly different communication rates, which one is
the "slow" one?

LHA / WMD


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