Why are we talking about the Apple IIe? I'm sure a lot more people that learned to code and about the guts of the machine in the 80's did so on Speccies  (£180 in 1984), C64s ($595 in 82) or Amigas ($699 in 1987) than on Apples/IBMs.<p>I was bought a Spectrum as a child (and saved up christmas money for an Amiga). My parents weren't at all technical. I learnt a bit of BASIC  but not much (I didn't have the patience to program much), but I did get a decent understanding of what went on inside. So I was happy to build my own computers.