I was one of those boys who bought a TRS-80. The thing is, I don't remember it as a peer accepted pursuit for me either. This was before anyone noticed, let alone Hollywood recast it as their version of Revenge of the Nerds. This was when being a nerd was not nice.
While I did get some quasi support from people who thought it might help in a career someday, the much more common response in those days was "who needs a home computer?"
Update: I agree that we should encourage everyone with an aptitude now to go into higher ROI fields (of which CS is one), I do think it is a bit reconstructed history to make TRS-80s actually "cool" and "non-cool kids excluded."
Indeed, the TRS-80 was not even a game machine. PCs as game machines came a bit later, and as price effective ones, much later.
While I did get some quasi support from people who thought it might help in a career someday, the much more common response in those days was "who needs a home computer?"
Update: I agree that we should encourage everyone with an aptitude now to go into higher ROI fields (of which CS is one), I do think it is a bit reconstructed history to make TRS-80s actually "cool" and "non-cool kids excluded."
Indeed, the TRS-80 was not even a game machine. PCs as game machines came a bit later, and as price effective ones, much later.