Getting off topic, but the millennium bug? It was very real, and...

Getting off topic, but the millennium bug? It was very real, and the risks had it not been addressed were enormous. Probably not "planes falling out of the sky" level - the media did over-hype it - but I've been working in IT for well over twenty years. I know people who worked on fixing the problems. It was not an easy job - but the fact that nothing particularly significant happened on the 1st of January 2000 was down to a lot of hard work put in to prevent problems. It isn't proof that it was overblown.

Financial institutions, in particular, would have had severe problems - there were cases of credit card terminals in 1997 rejecting freshly issued cards as being expired, because their expiry date was in 2000, to give one example. Look up the RISKS digest, and do a search on Y2K in their archive; there were quite a few genuine, and pretty serious, issues out there; and because of the way older code was written, finding and fixing the causes of those issues was very much a non trivial task. (And somewhat ironically, because of the way some of that code was fixed, we're now seeing issues crop up in a few places - because the 'easy' fix was to say "if the date is 20 or later, it's the 1900s, if it's 19 or earlier, it's the 2000s". Not as broadly as the original problem would have been, because a fair chunk of it all was fixed properly, but nonetheless.)

It's the usual story. Fix a problem before it blows up, and people wonder why you put in the effort. Let the problem blow up and then fix it, and you're lauded as a hero. We don't give anywhere near enough credit for preventative work.

The next big one will be the Year 2038 problem. That one's going to be much harder to fix than Y2K... especially for 'legacy' systems that are difficult to replace.