Re: Can someone...
has anyone offered to write a Linux-based OS solution for that old hardware? I have to wonder whether there are less expensive solutions that could be less than 1/10 of that [something like "me working on it for a couple of months"]. In theory, you could port C/C++ applications that were written for Windows using existing libraries and toolkits. I have proved the concept by turning MFC applications into POSIX applications using wxWidgets. It's not 1:1 but there is a correlation that, with a reasonable level of effort, can be ported in a month or two [per application] when _I_ do the work. I'm sure there are others who could even do better than me with this sort of thing. Or it could become a pure GTK or Qt application, by carefully re-writing just the UI and dealing with any other windows-isms using some kind of compatibility lib [home-grown or already written, whichever].
In any case, 250k (USD or GBP) is a bit steep. that's like an overpaid team of "paid by the line" coders working for a top-heavy consulting firm. An indie can probably do it for less than 1/4 that... and if you could patch Wine or even CentOS to do the job, you're getting closer to the "1/10 of that" mark I initially suggested.