Two recently proposed approaches to recognize temporal patterns have been proposed by J¨ager with the so called Echo State Network (ESN) and by Maass with the so called Liquid State Machine (LSM). The ESN approach assumes a sort of “black-box” operability of the networks and claims a broad applicability to several different problems using the same principle. Here we propose a simplified version of ESNs which we call Simple Echo State Network (SESN) which exhibits good results in memory capacity and pattern matching tasks and which allows a better understanding of the capabilities and restrictions of ESNs.