But of course the real mass storage device during the PC revolution was the casette tape recorder, and the monitor: a TV screen. Very crude by today's standards, but exciting to see the prompt come up back then. Your own computer! You could do anything -- all it took was writing a program. Or typing it in from a magazine.
I've been arguing locally, as a member of the school board, that a recent $10K grant we received should be spent on something like your $35 British Raspberry Pi's to keep and bring home for elementary school students. But the District administration IT department won't hear of it and insists on $275 Chromebooks kept at school. They call that "teaching technology."
If you want to teach technology, give a kid a computer that won't do much without programming and building it up into something. And let him/her take t home and mess around with it. If it breaks it's 35 bucks to replace.