[mhewett]

I was a computer operator in the late 1970s and I used to read ComputerWorld which was the biggest enterprise tech "journal" (actually a newspaper) of the day. In the late 1970s they had a number of articles commenting on the need to fix the Y2K problem. So smart people were planning for it well ahead of time. On the other hand memory and storage were so limited then it was probably hard to get permission to allocate two more bytes for a 4-digit year. But people were definitely thinking about it for a long time before the year 2000.