Many years back I knew an insider in the Spielberg/Paramount vicinity and actually got to see the dark, warm room with a batch of Amigas purring away rendering frames for use for a show. I visited him several times and can't pin down which visit it was, but my guess is that it was for SeaQuest (a.k.a. "Star Trek Underwater" - if you ever watched it much you'd understand). Oh, and a trivia note - Darwin was animatronic!
As long as you understand that Lightwave is now on version 9.2, (versus what, 4.3 for Amiga), has been multi-core aware for a couple of years, and as they said above could probably exceed in speed (and certainly in quality due to new features) on a single multi-core Intel what that roomful of '040's could do....then it's perfectly valid to try to recreate such an environment.
I'm not sure that it's really worthwhile for a young person just learning 3D to have to suffer through the waits involved with using old hardware, though. Any job in which they can be meaningfully productive AT RENDERING is going to be using pretty up to date hardware and software. If all one is doing is nonlinear editing and an occasional logo, sure, one could still do it productively on a Toaster / Flyer. Move the task to hi-def, however, and it's just going to be too painful to do it old school. :-?
