My 8th grade 7th period computer class teacher gave me the Atari 800 she owned, the disk drive to go with it, the modem, two of the “space age” joysticks (the ones that looked like the body of a space gun with the joystick on top), and several games on both cartridge and disk, with my favorite cart being Caverns of Mars and for disk it was the supremely buggy Sir Galahad and the Holy Grail, the spiritual successor to Adventure from the 2600. I used this computer from 1990 until it finally died in 1996. I wish I still had it now that I can potentially repair one. I still have the power supply for it, which ironically works just fine with a NES.
Wrap Trap and some driving game that used an asterisk for the car inside text based (asterisks, naturally) walls were my go-tos in the 2nd and 3rd grade in my GATE class. Those computers were replaced with a pair of Apple //e computers and daisywheel printer in my 4th grade year. I was the only one in the entire school, student or teacher, that could take apart the printer to clean and maintain it. My favorite //e games were T-Rex and The Secrets of Science Island. I liked its version of Moon Patrol as well, but found it too easy after mastering the Atari 2600 version, which was far, far more finnicky with its controls.
For most people it’d be as a hobby, though for someone like me it’d be for learning various subsystems used in actual servers.
Fun Fact: Back in 1990 when I was in my first internship with the San Diego Consortium and Private Industry Council (try saying that three times fast!), I took up learning their UNIX system on my own. As this was back before UNIX got serious about security, I was able to create an account with mainframe administrator privileges. The name of the account? “Data”. I suspect that helped it remain hidden, probably long after I finished my second internship there a year later.
The only thing I really hated about their setup were the terminals. Even being only able to use the hunt and peck typing method back then, I could fill in forms so fast that I’d have to wait several minutes for the forms to fill in from the buffer. It didn’t take me long to figure out the right rhythm to type so as to keep the buffer full but not overflow it and drop characters. My supervisor hated that I did that. I’d usually finish my pile of forms so quickly that they had to give me menial tasks such as running off copies on their (at the time, expensive and complex) Xerox multi-bay copier or things like typing up hand written reports on their Macintosh Plus computer (they got the most out of the $1k stipend I was paid for the internship each of the two years). My nickname ended being “copy boy” by several of the ladies that worked there. 