I did. I used my mom's typewriter, which she typed her thesis on in the 1950s, and switched to word processing on a college owned TRS-80 before getting an MS-DOS machine of my own.

The big breakthrough was editing. WYSIWIG didn't solve a problem in that space. College papers didn't need different fonts, and it was sufficient to let the computer take care of formatting, like using Markdown.

I'm not dismissing the Apple, but it was priced out of my reach in 1984.