Rodent Regatta

HEY TO ALL YOU LINUX GURUS
And thanks in advance!

Today I visited with a guy who has a bunch of older PC’s – long story. He’s considering some possibilities for them. One idea is to turn as many of them as possible into simple personal productivity and browsing PC’s. Here are my questions:

• How old and tired can gear be and still run one of the distributions of Linux?
  
• Can a 200Mhz Pentium with max RAM of 64MB do it?
  
• Which Linux distribution is best for those not interested in hacking the OS?
  
• Which Office clone is best for old, tired PC’s running Linux?
  
• Could you run Linux/StarOffice or OpenOffice on a 386 class machine?