Or rather, how close was it like Silicon Valley to be working in tech in the UK during that time? For their time, lot of name brand products in computing came from the UK, and even though the market today is not very lucrative, the nation still left a legacy to the computing industry as a whole. So when this sort of activity was in great flux in the 80s I can only assume it must've been really great to work as a software engineer, comparatively speaking.
From someone outside the UK who doesn't understand the economics of the nation it's sort of a mystery to me that they had quickly become a shadow of what once was.
