[flohofwoe]

This is definitely true, at least for Eastern Germany where I grew up. The best you could get as a 'citizen' was a typewriter. Any sort of printing or copying machine was off-limits (edit: at least until the mid-80's, you could definitely buy a 9-needle-printer, but those things were scarce and expensive, I remember that I sent cassette tapes with source code via snail-mail halfway through the country to a guy who had access to a printer, and a few weeks later I got the printed listings sent back) :D

East Germany put a lot of effort into tech-education though. The "glorious leadership" realized that they were quickly falling behind in high-technology during the 70's, and they actually tried to fix this.

Most of the 8-bit computers that Eastern Germany started to manufacture in '84 were former 'grass-roots' designs done by hardware engineers as side projects.

When the government desperately needed cheap hardware for education, those side projects got green-lit and were developed into official projects. This is where reality kicked in again unfortunately, the limited resources of the "real-socialist economy" didn't allow for the mass production necessary to fulfill private demand, so everything that was built went to schools and universities (at least!), but also military academies.