I need to create a program to send and receive a 1080 x 1080 pixel jpeg image between two computers using electrical pulses with the ability to time transmission length. What should I use? My prefered os is windows xp

"Using electrical pulses"?

Can your question make any less sense?

If I'm reading your mind right, you want to learn about socket programming. This is a popular HOWTO:

http://beej.us/guide/bgnet/

Moved: This thread is more suitable in <PROGRAMMING> and has been moved accordingly to help your thread/question get the exposure it deserves.

On the chance that "electrical pulses" implies a direct computer-to-computer connection (e.g. using a serial cable):

Serial Programming Guide for POSIX Operating Systems

I can't say with certainty, but I'm pretty sure Windows does not strive for POSIX compliance. See Wikipedia: POSIX--POSIX for Windows

Be that as it may, I'm sure there are some examples/tutorials for serial port programming available for Windows out on the web.

Regarding the compiler (from the title of your post), a lot of the members here will be most familiar (possibly exclusively familiar) with gcc. You can get gcc for Windows via Cygwin or MinGW as described on this download page

If you use a Linux distribution, gcc will be available through your distribution's package manager.

No standard C library that I know of includes an 'electrical_pulse()' function or system call. Maybe you should be a lot more specific about the electrical nature of the pulses, and what hardware you expect will generate and receive them.
Almost any existing networking and communications protocol/standard would satisfy the requirement, and virtually all of these will be supported in some fashion by existing OS's and the respective system calls. I assume that Windows provides some provisions for measuring time, although I doubt there will be anything fine-grained enough to measure hardware-level timing of communications signaling in any OS.

--- rod.

Also, there's actually a fancy computery jargon term for these electrical pulses. They're called "bits".