I seem to remember something that did that back around 1970. What was it called - Harmony, Consensus or something like that?

Acorn used to supply a circuit diagram and fairly good reference docs for the BBC.

Actually, that's not as silly as it sounds. IIRC the Beeb's PSU produces fairly standard 5V and maybe 12V and the machine doesn't draw all that much power. I would have thought it would be quite easy to find a standard PSU of appropriate spec that could be substituted.

While it wasn't C++, I have used multiple inheritence as a mixin mechanism to implement a common protocol (e.g. propogating events) across classes that have ownership relationships but no other inheritance. The non-contrived examples I've seen for multiple inheritance all tend to be this sort of thing. Multiple inheritance isn't completely useless. You would probably find it useful for implementing default behaviours in environments where there are multiple sources of program control coming from a framework that an object has to play nicely with. One example might be a widget library for a GUI toolkit.

One, in particular, comes to mind.

You can - at some expense - get fire rated safes that will protect magnetic media against a substantial fire. A small one is a few hundred pounds, although larger ones run into many thousands. You might consider a safe of this type.

I suspect that for every distributed OSS project that succeeds there are many that fail. You see the successful projects and the failed ones tend to slip back into obscurity. You can possibly learn something from the ones that succeed, but it shouldn't be 'OSS projects successfully manage distributed teams all the time.' I think that the majority of such projects actually fail. However, reaching out for advice or examples from the ones that actually work might be helpful. You should find folks on Slashdot who actually are involved with successful OSS projects. Maybe they will have something worthwhile to say.

You can still buy high quality PCs these days - they're called workstations. If you just want a good quality PC then take a look at an entry level workstation like a HP Z230 or a Dell T1700. One of the markets these machines are sold into is desktops running mission critical apps that have to meet SLAs. They tend to be built to higher standards than mainstream PCs.

I suggest that you look for a suitable secondhand workstation (e.g. a HP Z800) on Ebay. Either look for one in the right configuration or add memory, disk etc. to suit. Ex-lease workstations go for a small fraction of their new price on Ebay and parts for mainstream models (typically HP or Dell) are also quite readily available on the open market.

I did this with XW9300s a few years ago and a couple of SFF Z210s more recently. Works fine for me.

I did my undergrad degree on a lab not unlike this (actually Sun workstations using NIS/NFS to mount home directories - this was the 1990s). These machines were likely an 1-2 orders of magnitude less powerful than even your smallest desktop - desktops with 32MB of RAM and servers with 128-256MB. There was no resource management aside from disk quotas and the lab worked fine.

Depending on what you mean by high-usage I would have thought even modest desktop systems would be powerful enough for just about anything people get up to in a university lab (unless you mean Z800s with 192GB of RAM and somebody with an application for a machine that big). You could try goosing your smaller desktops by searching for 20-40GB SSDs to use as system disks (this should be plenty for the O/S, installed applications and swap) or upgrading the memory; SSDs like that go for peanuts on ebay.