When I started hacking computers, 300bps was a huge luxury. You needed a "glass teletype" to support those awesome speeds. I could read ASCII directly off the punched paper tape. Teachers would not give you the login password -- you had to borrow their short punched paper tape "login key" to login, so being able to read paper tape was one of my "leet hacker skillz". Of course, it took an entire hour to download a tiny low-res picture of a naked lady at 300bps off a BBS back in the day. Kidz these days don't know how good they have it. We couldn't just google "naughty words" back when I was a kid. You had to have real determination and dedication just to get a little taste of what is a "torrent" of media content these days.
9600bps is WAY too fast. When I want to see IF there is data traffic (with no other tools than a blinking LED), I set the interface to 110bps so I can see the bits.