Not jealous of your siggie, I've got my Savior's Cross, my Luke, and my Deliverance, so I have nothing to be jealous about in that dept.

A 300 baud modem runs at 300 bits/sec. Today's dialups run at 50,000 bits per second. Cable modems run 100 times faster than that, or more. You do the math.

Today's Technical Trivia:

Baud is the number of times the signal changes each second. Bits per second is how many useful bits you get each second. In the old days, one signal change could transmit one bit. Since the late '80s they've been able to transmit several bits over a single signal-change. The term baud is now meaningful only to telephone engineers, modem designers, and standards bodies. The rest of us only care about bits-per-second.