the simplest network?

[Ghoulish Delight]

It is possible, but it's not entirely straight forward.

You'll have to manually set an IP address for each computer, which is easy to do. But you'll also need a special kind of ethernet cable called a "crossover cable". They're cheap and available at any decent computer supply store.


ETA: Oh yeah, BtD's right, crossover cables are sometimes referred to as data transfer cables. But don't waste your money on any sort of data transfer software, just get the cable and do it manually.