In 1980 as a math grad student, I took out my bank's first student loan for a computer, $3000 ($9000 now) for an Apple II. My annual stipend was not much more. My branch of math at that time was a foot race with no rule against bicycles (they hardly knew what one was) and I saw computerizing my field as an alternative to dropping out. The Apple II didn't really help here; later we managed to bit-squeeze a viable computer algebra system [1] onto the first 128K Macintosh, leading to colleague adoption. Other friends got their start in computing, learning how to program the Apple II in my apartment.
One could learn the Apple II inside-out. I've never had that experience again. My first week I took a soldering iron to it to provide lower case support; I've been the surgeon for friends' computers ever since. There was a book (it must be somewhere on this archive) that explained the purpose of every byte in low memory.
For perspective, I was avidly learning Go as I started grad school, till I read on the back cover of one of James Davies' books that he had dropped out of math grad school to pursue Go. Ouch! The Apple II was a completely different, more approachable scale. I could master it and stay in grad school.