Command line enviroment for pupils.

[Midget]

I use it as a testbed, bit of a dog on a 3Ghz P4

[OutToLunch]

Giving VirtualBox a whirl at the moment, seems very nippy in comparison to VPC. Tried it with my handy Slax rescue CD set to use only 128mb of memory and it felt pretty much the same as running it from CD... Free for academic use and allows you to create your own VMs as easily as the full VMWare Workstation so all you'd need to do is pick a distro to play with and away you go...

http://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Downloads

Alternatively, you could let them loose in DOSBox if you want to show them what the bad old days were like...