A couple of friends and I drooled over an AT&T Unix manual that our public library had in 1990 - 1991. Unix seemed really cool but we could never afford a real Unix machine. We talked about pooling our money and buying a copy of Coherent but we never did. Then Linux came on the scene and Coherent was forgotten.
It was a PC tower, that the teacher would rent from his work once a week.
Given the timeframe, we would split in groups, having prepared our samples as best as we could in Turbo C for MS-DOS, with dummy implementations for the UNIX calls not available on MS-DOS.
Then we would take 15m turns, to try to make our applications run in Xenix with the actual real implementations, instead of the stubs.
Current generations have no idea how expensive it was to get into computers.
One thing about Coherent (and why I periodically fiddle about with implementing replacement, modernized kernel designs for it, albeit not in C) is that exactly like V6 UNIX it is an exercise in that kind of design, but being for the x86 and partially modernised to an early-90's level it's considerably more accessible than V6 to anyone who wants to look at the source code today to learn about that.
I ended up getting access to XENIX, too. It was thru a public access system but it was a long distance phone call. That put a damper on too much experimentation. They also didn't have a C compiler (or, if they did, I couldn't figure out how to use it).
Job related stuff is intermixed with traditional highschool content.
However that does not prevent applying to the university later on, many people go through this route in European countries where it is available, just in case.