They also relied on schools when I was going through school, even before the free license for students offers. My schools would get cheap or free use of office suite, windows, and adobe creative suite, we'd all learn to do our class work on them (or have multimedia elective essentially being 'learn adobe creative suite' class), pirate them for home use, and have it even more entrenched for doing actual work with. Considering when I started at school, computers for student use for my whole school could be counted on one hand and they only had word perfect or something on them, they adapted to that particular changing landscape amazingly.