Same here, we had two rooms that had 20+ Apple II computers, each student could use their own machine all to themselves. And our district was not rich, it must have cost more than 150k in today dollars.
There is a wonderful offshoot of Logo for Agent Based Modeling https://www.netlogo.org/ where one can conduct all sorts of simulations involving many thousands of agents.
I ran a small Mosix cluster a couple times just for funsies. I had forgotten about Sprite as the other SSI cluster operating system. It is really too bad that this line of research trailed off.
The Sprite kernel released by UCB doesn't run on any qemu target, but I've made ports to the PC and to sun4m, which qemu can run. I've gotten the sun3 (m68k) and sun4 (sparc) ports to run in phabric's fork/continuation of TME, NME [0], but the Lance emulation has a bug that'll cause some longer Ethernet frames to have a few bytes lopped off the end (kernel panics on RPC calls!) and the m68k MMU is missing an edge case that makes init segfault right after exec(). Need to upstream those sometime...
I've been running my cluster mostly off a mini PC with an N95 Atom CPU (root server + couple hosts to login to, Sprite's local filesystem path is buggy and shouldn't be trusted), with virtio network and storage drivers ported to Sprite. Sips electricity, and plenty fast storage for everything else. Migration works great between a real 486 PC compatible and my Zen5 desktop, along with some real SPARCstations mixed in there, and a SPARC laptop for fun.
I wanna release it some day, it'd be super easy to deploy new clusters with a single qcow2 and maybe a libvirt XML domain, but the code is currently a mess and still missing stuff, like a working `addhost` command (the provided one is just a csh script which checked files in/out of an RCS repo in /etc, with hardcoded paths to host mounts at Berkeley...)
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