A biophysicist- a person who built 3d structural models. Most scientists from tyhe era I'm describing use computers as tools and see periodically moving from system to system as an interruption/distraction from them doing science.
Were they paying for their own computer? This is a problem I've seen in academic science. Grants and departments don't want to pay for computers, so there's a tacit expectation that you'll buy one yourself. My spouse had to do this. In turn there's no consistent IT management of these computers.
My wife's attitude is typical: If they want to touch my computer, they can buy one that they own.
The group lead ("principal investigator") raised funding (from NIH and NSF) through grants to pay for computers. That's how it's normally done. Making grad students and postdocs buy their own server (not laptop) is not an act of honor. It's also a huge security issue (as you say, no consistent IT management).
In this case the scientist was a postdoc so they partly used the group lead's funding and partly had their own funding. That money was for science, not buying computers. It paid for NMR machine (a $10M device), solvents, reagents, going to conferences, grad students, color figures in papers... but my professor was fairly well-funded so we had a full-time "professional" sysadmin (not a grad student) and everybody had a $15K SGI Indy on their desk (which was abysmally slow, because it was the lowest of the low end capable of running OpenGL).
