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You underestimate how affordable or accessible a computer was in the eastern block. For reference, a color tv that is “mass produced” and didn’t need much expensive high tech parts would cost as much as you would earn in one year - if you manage to find one in a shop.
For a computer you needed to find keyboard, drive, monitor, software and the computer itself which would be at least equally expensive to a color tv.
All the chips had to be manufactured locally in the eastern block, because there was an embargo on western computer tech. RAM alone was 10x more expensive because the manufacturing process was very inefficient.
When I was young, we didn’t have hex codes, we only had 1 and 0s. One time we where all out of 1s, and I had to code a whole Database system with only 0s!