Sorry to be confusing by jumping around too much.
No, there is one monitor and the PC runs one OS at a time on a multi-boot.

The "Do you have that many monitors?" question was supposed to be asking if you had monitors for all your 486/386 PCs if you wanted to use them singly

Ahh....you had me excited there......yes I'm sure that many monitors could be aquired, if not KVM swtiches could be used.

Using this floppy and some crossover serial cables you could use the old PCs as "dumb terminals" connecting them to another Linux box.

If they have 8-16 MB RAM you can install Zipslack if you are lucky to have 120MB drives or larger.

Perhaps check out how the folks at FreeDOS are doing with their DOS clone.

Perhaps see how Minix will run on one.

Games, Old dos games.

Graphics exercises for the studes - using GW-Basic (or any other basic basic). Lots here on learning about the insides of a PC.

Assembler stuff. Read from a port, swap port.

End

For a while, I used a 486 for my home automation stuff. I basically controlled all of my X10 stuff with scripts and cron jobs.

With some basic electronics you can use the parallel port to control lights, relays, LCD character displays etc. More advanced stuff would be stepper motors like a floppy drive. Some basic robotic stuff

How old are these children?

I used FreeDOS in a VirtualPC in Windows before I trashed Windows to play some old DOS Games, it worked awesome, they all played as if I was using an old MS-DOS machine. You could throw that on one of them. You can find most of those dos games that used to cost 50 bucks for free download on the internet, although there is some controversy over whether that is illegal (the whole abandonware issue, personally, I would be happy if people were still using software that I had written over 10 years ago and had stopped selling, and I would be happy if they were able to download it, people need to quit bitching, it's not like they are downloading FarCry, they are downloading games like old Pac-Man games).

These kids are high schoolers, about to graduate, I'm not sure of the American grade equvalent. The use of a parallel port for switches sounds interesting. Any good docs? Is this possible with lets say....Pascal?

Definitely get them networked somehow (ethernet/serial/parallel). You could have them play games against each other (trying out various chess engines for example) as an extended screensaver.

Maybe an extravagant example of Dining Philosophers? Hehe. I can think of tons of useless stuff.

Some sort of network seems essential.....but I'm hoping for an idea worth of a science fair.

Back in HS we had a bunch of old 386s that we would do parallel port programming on using BASIC. We did what was said above (LEDs, 7 seg. displays, motors, electronic model trains). Really easy and simple and worked well. For dos stuff have a look at DosBox (http://dosbox.sourceforge.net/news.php?show_news=1). BASIC does it really easily using the OUT command which just takes an address and a value, the value is just bit/pin, really easy stuff. There are a few different address for the parallel port (I can't remember, but 387& seems oddly familiar, there is only 2 or 3 and it has to be one of them). We had all the parts to make a parallel port cable, we then wired a parallel port plug thingy up to some ribbon cable, then wired that up to some pins, and plugged that into one of those "learning electronics reusable breadbaord thingies".

http://www.lvr.com/parport.htm
http://www.computer-mentors.co.uk/co...ng-visual.html

I'm just brainstorming here based on you guys' input...but what's the feasiblity of using a parrallel port of a 386/486 to control simple flashlight type bulbs in a minature house? And more precisely in the turbopascal environment?

Thanks

You can not directly connect a flashlight bulb to the parallel port because they will draw to much current.

http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homep...wden/page6.htm

Its been a long time since I've used turbo pascal but yes it is possible using the port function.

Thanks for the link...I know about relays....guess I should have used my head a bit more with my last post. But anyways....on a scale of 1 to 10 with one being the hardest, what woudl you rate my lil project? And how difficult is it to get such relays?