Well, I took Holbrook’s advice and installed Cygwin. That makes a big difference. I never would have guessed I would be so inured to a commandline as to prefer it this much.
I have installed a few packages (vim, gcc [don’t know why, I just did it]). Nice to see there are lots of familiar packages ready to use. I also installed ActiveState perl. Try as I have to learn python, I have a little muscle memory a/k/a a few perl tricks and I have never worked out analogs to them.
I also found out there are some surplussed machines laying around so I may claim one and see if I can scare up a KVM switch. I may not need it if cygwin works as advertised.