Both my secondary and high schools had labs filled with MSX keyboards, B/W TVs and tape recorders.
My intro to programming came from Joe Pritchard books "MSX Exposed" and "Machine Language for MSX"... and I still have notebooks full of hand written programs... and a fully functional DAEWO MSX keyboard in the closet.
My school had MSX comps too, the Yamaha MSX (probably ones mentioned in the article that were sold to Soviet Union). A lot of experiments with low-level programming were done on them. Most docs were not available then (it was time before the Internet :) so it was a lot of piecing together random info and lots of trial and error. Also, it had a bunch of very addictive games (ah, King's Valley)...
Happy poking!