@phooky @th [Marks down that @phooky called 1200 baud "effectively pointless" on his naughty list]

@elb @phooky @th I used to monitor entire power stations over a 1200 baud uucp link ...

Some of the more recent Arduinos started the "reset at 1200 baud" thing so you could program them without reset button nonsense

@elb @th sorry! I meant that baud rate is effectively pointless for USB serial devices. For traditional serial connections, 1200 baud is still important for those who haven't yet achieved the inner peace necessary to accept the 110 baud connections of our enlightened ancestors

@phooky @th To be fair, 1200 baud is much less common than 300 or 9600, in my experience. I think my Osborne 1 is the only device I have that tops out at 1200 baud. I would argue that 600, 2400, and 4800 are even LESS common -- although 4800 has a killer app in NMEA sentences -- but it does seem to be near a nadir of useful.

For USB serial devices that _don't actually have a UART on the other end_, it's all fiction anyway. ;-)

@elb @phooky @th 2400 used to be pretty common for the first V.22bis modems (until some added compression on top).

Some acoustic couplers used 1200/75 (V.23) optionally.

From my experience with running dial-up BBSes, 300, 2400, 9600, 19200, 38400, 115200 were widely used on the serial port at some point.

@galaxis @phooky @th For sure, it was used for a lot of modem work! My experience has been that most modems are much more relaxed about their computer-side communication than their line-side communication, though, and willing to do some baud rate conversion.

I know there were a lot of TTL-to-tones chips in the 50-to-300 baud era, but they got smarter after that. I'm sure there were many that weren't, but that just hasn't been my experience!

@phooky @elb or the tranquility of forty-five baud for communicating with the ancient ones.

@th @elb now you have me wondering if there was ever an acoustic coupler for the model 15...

@th @elb oh, of course it's been done.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ElmhYLk4Pyg

@th @phooky @elb and now you've given me the very silly idea of transmitting Hellschreiber via piezo beeper to matrix displays, aargh

@scruss @phooky @elb e-ink would also be fun

@th @scruss @phooky That is GORGEOUS. Tell me more.

@elb @scruss @phooky turns out that is *not* Hellschreiber, it's a Bélinographe https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/B%C3%A9linographe

@th @elb @scruss If you haven't already seen it, the Secret Life of Machines episode about fax machines has a terrific bit (about 5:20 in) about Pantelegraphes, which date to the 1860's.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yuUyt9RG7pk

@phooky @th @elb the SLoM episode is good

The drum + photocell on a lead screw was used in lots of things like photo wires, duplicator 'spark' copiers and drum scanners (into the early 2000s)

Hellschreiber is an analogue dot-matrix printer. It can't send images more than 7px high, so it's mostly text Sync errors make the text go all wavy. The K3NG keyer for Arduino still (I think) has Hellschreiber sending