There is a Taoist story about it being impossible to know at the time whether an event is lucky or unlucky. At my age, you start to reflect how things have gone, from a safe distance.
I planned to go to Birmingham University to study mathematics with a side-order of computer science. My ‘A’ Level results were, to put it mildly, ‘below expectation’ so I scraped into Aston through the Clearing process, to study mathematics, computer science and physics. The teaching language was Algol 68 and the visionary assumption throughout the course was that within a few years all computers would be virtual memory systems. We would never have to worry about physical restrictions on memory allocation. We had a linear address space to play with, that could be as big as the available disk space and there would be a garbage collector to tidy up after me. A few years later, PCs were to make those assumptions invalid.
I actually graduating into a recession caused by a war to the death between Margaret Thatcher and the unions. Many large companies cancelled their graduate recruitment programmes. I was unemployed until just before Christmas, when I took the first job I was offered, as a programmer in a College of Higher Education in Cambridge. I’d never heard of the computer they used. It was one of the first batch of half a dozen DEC VAXes delivered to the UK: a 32-bit super-mini running the new Virtual Memory System OS, VAX/VMS. I specialised in VMS/OpenVMS for the next 25 years, gradually becoming a system manager and specialist in high-availability clusters and development environments. I had side-stepped Bill Gates’ “No-one needs more than 640K” pronouncement and all the mess that went with it.
I lost direct touch with software development until a few years ago when I joined an agile team as analyst and decided I wanted to get back into writing code. Initially I picked Python, until I saw a demonstration of Clojure. I knew I had to have it. Clojure designer Rich Hickey says that we can treat disk space as effectively infinite. That has a huge impact on our ability to design software as temporal flow rather than last known state. Servers have become virtual too. Software is doing everything it can to escape the physical realm entirely. I’m holding on for a free ride, hoping to stay lucky, a link to a virtual copy of ‘The Wizard Book’ on my Cloud-drive. Nothing is Real. I’m not even sure about Time.
On The Outside 
You may be interested in readinf some posts on linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/groups/Algol68-2333923