Many, many years ago in the building containing the UCLA ARPANET Lab where ARPANET host #1 resided, there were a bunch of long serial line cables that ran from the computer room (we called them "machine rooms" back then) to the relatively distant graduate student/staff work area cubicles with their own CRT terminals.

Due to the length and condition of those serial lines, the maximum speed typically was 1200 bps. In the computer room, so close to the systems, we ran at 9600 or 19200.

I proposed to the building facilities team that new serial cables be pulled so that we could bump up the speeds in the cubicles to similar speeds that we had in the computer room itself.

This took more convincing than I had originally anticipated, because the initial response I got was that the upgrade was unnecessary, since "nobody could read faster than 1200 bps anyway." -L