[marcus_holmes]

I worked on the Y2K project for a large infrastructure company in the UK.

I was getting paid £50/hour to write VB code and maintain an Access database for the change control system that the COBOL devs used. They were getting paid around £500/hour, because most of them had been hauled out of retirement, to actually change the COBOL code. There were ~1000 people in the building I was in, around half of them devs, around half of those the COBOL guys. The project lasted ~2 years. So, back of envelope maths: 500x250x40x(52-4)x2=£480,000,000. That was just to pay the COBOL devs to amend the codebase for just the billing system.

So yeah, at least 3 or 4 orders of magnitude, I'd say.