Need a hand accessing the serial ports

Hello,
I've been out of C++ programming for a while and suddenly find myself needing to be able to write some...

Basically I need to be able to write a character to a serial port and read it from the serial port at the other end of the transmission wire...
I've looked through all my books from long ago and I can't find anything about opening up a serial port stream.
If anyone knows what the libraries are that I need to include as well as the functions I need to call (or streams I need to declare), I would be greatly appreciative. (or perhaps I'm approaching the problem from the wrong direction, in which case please smack me one to set me straight)

Thanks for your help,
DW13

You only need to send one character?
OK...
I have had pretty good success using the mscomm32.ocx control in Windows... it really depends on what platform your working on as far as what is available and reasonably easy to work with.

Yes, I only need to send a single char at a time. This is for a class project (could you guess?) where the real focus is the medium between the two computers.

As for the OS I'm using, I'll use whatever is easiest, ranging from DOS 6.22 to Windows XP.

Thanks for your help,
DW13

this page might be useful.