The Y2K issue was very real. The media stories about the end of the world being near were not.
I work in IT and a spent probably 3 years leading it up to it fixing the date format and testing endless systems. We ran fail scripts and there were lots of stuff that would not have happened properly, including things like payroll. It is probably one of the best examples of the IT world working together to prevent some pretty significant global issues. One report indicated nearly £400bn had been spent globally upto 1998 fixing the problems before they had impact. Nobody needed to stock pile beans and live in a cave mind.
There were still some pretty uncomfortable issues not identified or resolved that had real life consequences. Banking issues, airlines had problems. Some amusing things like the first baby born in denmark on Jan 1st was recorded as being 100. Some serious things like a social care system losing sight of patients over 100 for a short time. Most of these things were dealt with very quickly of course, because we knew to look for them.
If you are still reading this, well done, there continue to be problems of a similar nature. Time recording in computer systsems can be mega precise and bloody complicated. It is thought that the loss of the NASA deep impact space craft in 2013 was down to date / time recording issues and poss an indirect consequence of Y2K. We also have Y38K to look forward too, which is a rather dull issue so dont bother with it.
In summary, the media and crazy theories ran wild in the time leading upto Y2K, but the work behind the scenes prevented the vast majority of issues seeing the light of day, though it was a real threat. Us IT geeks are superheroes really
