I've been in that situation where I was coding by day and didn't have a computer at home. Or at least, I didn't have one that was the same platform as the one I was using at work. Growing up there was at one point a Commodore 64, some kind of Tandy, and a UNIX workstation, but at work I was developing on Windows NT, Solarix, and HP/UX.

In another case, I had recently moved to a new city and we were targeting an internal proprietary platform (again with Windows NT) and also targeting Solaris.

There was a time when you would go to work and you would be working with header files and libraries that were proprietary and for which your company was paying an exorbitant per-head license fee.