Quote Originally Posted by curian88 View Post
My professor just tells me about it being sent across as data on the same baud rate/frequency but i dont understand how this 2 diff pics can understand diff languages..
I may not be much better than your professor but...

It is not really two different languages. Pretty much anything serial is just a series of highs and lows (0 and 1), sometimes the standard will be for a swing from a negative to a positive, still look at it as high and low.

The different Operating Systems are sending/receiving the same type of signal. The device sending converts the data into the correct format.. clock timing, and data. The receiving machine will have code to convert this back to something useful.

So the code on each machine may be in different languages, but they are doing the same thing. You might think about this in internet terms, HTML. Cross platform because the code generating the data and the code interpreting the data both "understand" the HTML.

This might help some.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_..._Interface_Bus

Sorry if I confused things more. Or was not any help at all.