How desirable they were! Our school had a few small TRS-80s (Level I) for the pupils in my last year, and one full blown one with the floppy drive, but that was only for the staff. We couldn't even afford floppies. How wonderful it all was. It exuded explorability, in contrast to modern phones and computers, which are very accessible, but don't let you feel what it's like to build something out of almost nothing. POKE-ing in memory to change something on screen feels more exciting than having huge frameworks with multiple inference engines available at your fingertips, if only you could manage to read the multi-megabyte documentation.