lots of holes in my serial port self teaching

[blackbeard]

so i've been doing some research into serial port control. one thing i can't seem to find is an example of how a serial port outputs useful information. i know it outputs ones as negative voltage (a concept which causes my brain to bsod) and zeros as positive voltage and that it needs to be converted through something like a max232 chip to be readable by most electronics (0v for zero and +3.3v for one) but i'm stumped at just about everything else. anyone serial port knowlegable?

[billhowl]

This is one byte of Data, it output 0x41 the character A
The setting is 7E2
serial port using a standard that call RS232
Here are some links that have more info on serial port

http://www.arcelect.com/rs232.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_port
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RS-232

[blackbeard]

thanks allot! i've read the wiki links and they're very useful. the first link looks very interesting