My first computer was an Atari ST, which cost me around £200 but I had to pay £250 extra to get a decent DTP program for it (which came on about a dozen floppies) and, later, a large amount of money (but I can't remember exactly how much) to buy a hard drive for it, that held a massive 80Mb of data!
However I'd used BBC Model Bs before that (at the school where I was teaching).
Prior to that I'd used Sheffield Polytechnic's mainframe computer when I was at college. Initially we had to prepare loads of punched cards and post them (by good old snail mail) to the Poly and then wait a week or so to see the results of our 'programmes'. (Yes, we still used the British spelling then, not 'programs'!). In practice all we got back most of the time was a note telling us that we'd mis-typed one of the cards, so the programme couldn't be run!
Later on we were able to put out programmes onto punched tape, phone the Poly (but only during a few, very limited, time slots) and ask someone to put the receiver into the modem cup at their end while we started the tape running at our end (and, joy of joys, we even had a monitor and printer so that we could see the results of our efforts straight away!).