Re: Only the straight-A students had access to the schools computer (singular)
A local Tech College?
You were lucky!
The best we had access to was a classmate's friend who came to visit for the summer and went to a no-name private school in a different part of the country - where they had a Commodore PET on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory, in an unlit cellar with no stair access, with a sign on the door saying ‘Beware of the Leopard.'