This is such a misconception. The only reason things didn’t completely collapse into chaos was thousands of people working around the clock to make sure it didn’t. This is even part of the plot of Office Space. It’s great to take the smooth transition for granted as an end-user, but if a lot of people didn’t put in a lot of time and effort, many many things could and would have gone horribly wrong.
We weren’t just working hard, we did it for years to make sure that all the interlinking systems would still work together, and rehersed many different failure modes and how to cope with them. Remarkably almost everyone actually planned ahead and got the work done in time, so at 00:00:00 on 1/1/2000 very little went wrong, and people outside the field ended up thinking it had been overblown.
That’s the trouble with working in I.T. People don’t notice when you do your job right.
This basically happens all the time.
There a problem (lots of dead children). A massive amount of effort and money is spent on doing something about it (measles vaccine). The problem is basically solved (2015). People without any sense or knowledge say it wasn’t really that bad (antivaxxers).
With Y2K, at least it wasn’t going to happen again, with measles were less lucky.
Some of us were hoping for collapse.
Pepperidge Farm remembers the “Y2K Ready” stickers
