Yes, it was a real crisis. This revisionist history that some are now saying it was no big deal. It was a big deal and many people spent many hours in the 90's assuring that the financial side of every business continued. I am starting to get a bit offended at the discounting of the effort put in by developers around the world. Just because the news didn't understand the actual nature of the crisis (Y2K = primarily financial problems) is no excuse to crap on the hard work of others. It is sad that people that got the job done by working years on it get no credit because they actually got the job done.

I see this as a big problem because Y2038 is on the horizon and this "not a big deal" attitude is going to bite us hard. Y2K was pretty much a financial server issue[1], but Y2038 is in your walls. Its control systems for machinery that are going to be the pain point and that is going to be much, much worse. The analysis is going to be a painful and require digging through documentation that might not be familiar (building plans).

1) yes there were other important things, but the majority of work was because of financials.