From this 2001 article that asked people about their first personal computer (but somehow couldn't come up with anyone who'd ever owned an Atari 800 or ST). Newhart died a few days ago, and was one of the true comedy legends, and I'd never have guessed he had a PET back in the day (long before personal computer ownership was common):
Commodore PET (1977)I remember leafing through a copy of Popular Science magazine and seeing an ad for a Commodore computer that had 8- or 16 kilobytes. It had an awful-looking screen, and it was $795. I thought I’d better get one because I had sons who were going to be in high school and might want to know about computers.Later, I moved up to the 64 KB model and thought that was silly because it was more memory than I would ever possibly need.I got them for the kids and then found I was fascinated by them. The first ones had tape drives. You would get a program like a word processor, put the tape in and then walk away for about a half an hour while the computer loaded it. But the first time I used a spell checker and it corrected a word, I thought, “We are getting close to God here.”Bob Newhart(Comedian/actor)Los Angeles