Communicating with a device

At work i have this device which Aquires Data Via other devices...

But befor it can do this i need to tell the Data Aquisition System how many devices its looking for and set up differnt parameters for these devices.

Currently we use a laptop and a very un-user friendly program and communicate via a Serial Line.

Im not a very experienced programmer but what i need to know is how would i go about finding out how the existing software communicates with the Device so that i can attempt to rewrite the software

Did you get any info on the hardware when you got it?

You Could hook the serial port into another computer and montior it with mscomm control