I’d suggest the number of British expats in Silicon Valley who started programming on a BBC Micro or Spectrum suggests that it very much did pay off, just not in the way anticipated.
That’s a good point. I originally meant that the PC took over the world, but if you take a step back and look at the influence of that ubiquity, yeah. That’s a good point :)
I started playing with a ZX Spectrum back in the early eighties, as a youngster, and directly credit it with my IT-career.
I only wish I'd tried writing computer games at the time, instead of hacking existing ones for infinite lives!