I'm from before that time of shared family computers.
I bought and hacked and built my own computer equipment. My electronics hobby was considered odd and too expensive. So I worked, saved, scrimped and scrounged. The first 'real' computer I bought was one of the very early Exidy Sorcerer computers (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exidy_Sorcerer). I had used a KIM-1 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KIM-1) and a Apple I (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_I) at school. I went to college during high school where I used punch card computers and PDP-11. In some ways when I bought my first one, the Sorcerer, it was a step down, except I got the whole thing to myself and I could open it up and hack it, which I did, adding memory, more I/O, tape data storage (my own version, not the bought one). It was great fun.
Later after I left the house my parents started buying family computers and then still later computers for each of my seven siblings as they went off to college. Prices came down and the computers became more mainstreamed.