The purpose of this project is to provide a fixture which may be used as a local area network for a course similar to the Small Systems Workshop course (EECC756) as taught in the spring of 1986. This fixture will provide the physical layer of the local area network. This network would be Ethernet like but use an RS-232C communication between the fixture and the nodes. In addition to simulating the ether the fixture would provide for on-line analysis of the packets being sent to provide feedback to the student as well as the professor. The IBM PC/AT type personal computer was selected as the host for the fixture since it is a basic unit which is available at the current time. In addition it provided an excellent base operating system. The software that was developed makes use of the direct system calls to the MS-DOS operating system whenever possible
