[DreamSpinner]

Yes, it was real.

Keep in mind that it was also used as a significant contributing factor to replace a lot of major legacy IT systems (especially accounting systems) at big organisations (a lot of SAP rollouts in the late 90s had Y2K as part of the cost justifications).

The company I worked for ran a Y2K Remediation "Factory" for mainframe software - going through and change to 4 digits, checking for leap year issues, confirming various calculations still worked.

I worked on a full system replacement that was partially justified on the basis of (roughly) we can spend 0.3x and do y2k patches, or spend X and get a new system using more recent technologies and UIs.

There were still problems, but they were generally in less critical systems as likely major systems had been tested, and were remediated or replaced.

Keep in mind that there was often much more processing that occurred on desktop computers (traditional fat client) - so lots of effort was also expended on check desktop date rollover behaviour. Once place I worked at had to manually run test software on every computer they had (10's of thousands) because it needed reboots and remote management was more primitive (and less adopted) at the time.