Was it 110, 135, then 300?

??? 1 bps is pretty slow! Emile Baudot invented a five-key chorded keyboard, a way to turn the keypresses into a signal and send it electrically, I assume some kind of printer, and a five-bit binary-coded character set. People realized they needed a unit to measure the speed of information transmission. They created the unit -- one change in the signal state per second -- and named it the "baud" after Baudot. (Old books talk of a machine working at so many bauds, which makes sense but still seems funny to me.) If a signal has more than two states, then one baud for that signal is more than one bit per second. Someone named Murray (I forget his first name) came up with a new five-bit code designed to save wear on the tape punches by making the most frequent letters have the fewest holes. People often talk about Baudot code when they really mean Murray code. The Teletype models that use the Murray code run at about 45 baud (or more if you change the gears). -- Derek