Yes and no. "Computers are the future", so middle class parents felt like they HAD to buy their kids a cheap Commodore or something. I think 80% of them ended up in the closet, most of them were used like game consoles and maybe 1% of them created assembly language programmers. I know successful engineering people who had no interest in atari/commodore video game stuff.
Meanwhile, college students needed real work computers which were still quite expensive then. PC-XT/Mac Plus computers were not cheap in the late 1980s.
Meanwhile, college students needed real work computers which were still quite expensive then. PC-XT/Mac Plus computers were not cheap in the late 1980s.