Sure bro, thanks for the vaguely understood nonsense about stuff I was directly involved in.
Just for clarity bit rate and baud rate are two completely different things. Modem throughput was not quoted in baud rate because they use multiple tones to send several bits per signal change, so trying to make yourself sound clever exposed that you don't know what you're waffling about.
This sounds like the thing a guy might say when he doesn't have a good argument. It might be an indication that
you don't know what you're talking about.
Baud is the correct terminology to describe the connection speed between two analog modems communicating over POTS lines. In newer, higher bandwidth digital systems we usually call this the symbol rate.
Bits per second is how you describe the connection speed between your modem and your computer's serial port. You're normally running the serial connection at twice the baud rate to account for the hardware compression inside the modem, and to prevent buffer overruns. For 56k modems your serial port would be configured to run at 115.2k.
Before you even start with "but internal modems..." every dialup modem in the PC compatible world is has an RS-232 connection to the computer, whether that be a physical connection to a serial port, or an onboard UART in the case of an internal hardware modem, or virtually as a software device in Winmodems.
56k modems were extremely common in 1998, as was 128kbps (bits, not baud
) ISDN if you had deeper pockets. In the US, cable companies were providing internet at the blistering speed of 1mbps within easy reach of regular folk
Lots and lots and lots of people were self hosting stuff.
ISDN was a weird and expensive technology, being essentially some small fraction of a T1. It gave you two direct links back to the phone company of 64k each, plus a third link of 8k. Normally in the use case of Internet access, the two 64k links would be bonded together to make a single connection of 128k of guarranteed bandwidth in both directions, and the 8k link was typically used to provide digital telephone service. ISDN didn't really take off in America as a residential service, but the symmetrical and guarranteed nature of ISDN did make it useful to some people. Also, you could put other things on those links, they didn't have to be pipes to the Internet. You would have had to be pretty well off to justify an ISDN line at your home, or have a real use case such as a home business. DSL, whcih was pretty new in 1998, was cheaper and capable of higher link speeds. Do keep in mind 128k isn't really all that fast if you have a lot of users trying to download things from you. It would only take 4 people with 33.6k modems simultaneously downloading your WAD files or whatever the fuck you're hosting, to saturate your connection and prevent your own web browser from working, even if your downlink is quiet. QoS didn't really exist just yet.
You are correct that ISDN links are measured in bits per second, not baud. The D in ISDN stands for Digital.
56k dialup only had the faster speed in the downlink direction and on the ISP end was a digital connection to the phone company. That 56k downlink was actually limited by FCC regulations to 53.3k, and you only got that with optimal line conditions. I remember dialing up and variously getting link speeds anywhere from 33 to 48k, and never the full 53.3k. The uplink was still analog, still 33.6k maximum, and still measured in baud.
DOCSIS as a standard was barely a year old in 1998. The rollout took a long time, and that's only if the cable company was interested in being an ISP. You might have had 1 megabit cable (1 meg downlink with what, 128k uplink?) available to you but a majority of Americans didn't. If they gave you a unique public IP and didn't block the ports you needed, it might've worked out for you, but you would have the same problems as with ISDN, and in later years, depending on your market you might also be dealing with the realities of shared bandwidth connections.
Cable Internet before DOCSIS was extremely rare and usually involved using a dialup modem as the uplink. You wouldn't be hosting jack shit on that. Ditto for one-way satellite Internet systems.
I guess if you were your own ISP or otherwise had a T1 in your home, none of this applies to you, but lets be realistic here.
My point is, for so many people dialup was the only real option available to them, and you're not realistically hosting a website on dialup.