A lad up our street did indeed have a Pong machine.
Actually I was slightly underwhelmed, though that probably wasn't helped as he was rationed as to how long he could use it: I recall some people discovered the hard way that TV burn-in was a thing!
After that it would've been the arcade machines, and my inevitable story is that my grandfather would take me around the arcades so I could watch him playing the latest games! By the early '80s pretty much everyone at school had either an Atari 2600 or a home computer like a Spectrum or something like that: PCs were extremely rare because they were hideously expensive: a standard home computer was £100-200 but even a basic PC was over a couple of grand, IIRC; even the likes of the Apple 2 was way out of most people's league. I didn't encounter my first PC until my last year at college in the late '80s, but by that time I'd discovered the internet and suddenly green-screens were a much more tempting way of wasting time than this newfangled PC.
I never did anything as exciting as monitoring seismic stuff! I got roped into doing tax calculations and... meh.
Well, I never said I was computer savvy and that was a "my end" bad. I so envy you young whippersnappers that grew up with computers! 
