Originally posted by Landon Blake:
It's been a couple of years since I've had to deal with a modem configuration, so bear with me.
Baud Rate
The speed of data transfer, roughly the number of bits per second. Modern modems are capable of 56k, but in the US they are limited to somewhere around 52k.
The rest of these settings control the format of character. A character consists of one start bit, some data bits, a parity bit and one or two stop bits.
Parity
Parity is a simple checksum. If parity is even, the parity bit forces the number of 1's in each byte to an even number. If parity is odd, the number of 1's will be odd. The receiver can validate each character in this fashion.
Data Bits
The number of bits that are data in each character. Usually 8 if no parity is used and 7 if parity is used.
Stop Bits
Frame the end of the character. Usually one in modern systems.
These settings don't really impact a Java program, except maybe where data transmission speed is concerned. Networks consist of several
layers, the lowest of which are hardware and data link (i.e. modem configuration). A Java program will only deal with higher-level abstractions of the network, like Sockets and URL's.