There's a throwaway quote about the school Gates was attending spending a few thousand dollars a year on a terminal and computer time.

The inflation factor is around 5X, so that's maybe $15k to $20k in modern money.

There were very few schools in the world with a five figure budget for computer experiments for a handful of pupils in the early 1970s.

To be fair, much of the coding community is highly educated - especially in the top companies, which generally hire from top schools - and therefore likely to be privileged.