The global panic over the millennium bug, 25 years on
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
I don’t think there’s a real disagreement here. A lot of IT workers did a lot of overtime, and also the truly apocalyptic predictions were ridiculous and never going to happen. People worked really hard to make sure manufacturing plants and payroll systems would keep chugging along, not to prevent the end of society, which was never really in play.
News had to get their fear views, even back then.
This pretty much sums it up.
Where I worked, we started fixing newer versions of our software products in the early 90's. I also contracted at a large business partner ERP company to build tools to fix earlier versions of their software, that was in 1996 (because many customers couldn't upgrade their ERP's to the fixed version by Y2K, so needed a temp in-place fix).
If the same thing were to happen tomorrow then yes, shit would really hit the fan.
Luckily IT is no longer the cowboy landscape it used to be. Sure there's still a lot of messing around but it's not like in the late 90s. I worked for a major company that had every laptop's administrator password set to <simple word>123 . That sort of stuff. I'm kinda surprised that didn't lead to really major hacks.