[gerdesj]

"but nothing bad seemed to happen to those countries either."

Bad things still happened everywhere, despite all our efforts. How bad depends on your perspective.

Several people suffered a bizarre form of resurrection, which normally, Christians would be all over it and jolly excited. Pensions suddenly started paying out, tax bills became due from people long dead. If you were not a relative of one of those people it did not affect you and if you read about it, you'd have perhaps said "typical" and got on with life.

Some devices just went a bit weird and needed turning off and on again. Who cares or even noticed? Someone did but again, you did not hear about those.

I spent quite a while patching NetWare boxes and applying some very shaky patches to Windows workstations. To be honest, back then, timezone changes were more frightening than Y2K - they happen twice a year and something would always crash or go wrong.

The sheer amount of stuff that was fixed was vast and I don't think your "countries that did and did not" thought experiment is valid. Especially as it is conducted without personal experience nor much beyond a bit of "ecce, fiat" blather.

Nowadays time is so easy to deal with. Oh, do you remember when MS fucked up certificates and Feb 29 a few years back?

[takinola]

Your examples make my point. Some bad things happened but not on a catastrophic level that warranted the level of investment that was put into Y2K projects.

[jandrewrogers]

Most of the companies I was familiar with then did not have enough time or resources to check for and resolve every problem, and these problems were very real. At some companies the engineers were given autonomy, authority, and effectively unlimited budget to do literally whatever was required to mitigate any publicly visible failures that occurred. We had a lot of backup plans to keep operations running, sometimes literally paper and pencil, when the inevitable failures occurred. A lot of companies were furiously faking it and throwing people at the problem.

I directly witnessed a few near catastrophic failures due to Y2K at different companies, literally company killers. We kept everything (barely) running long enough to shore up and address the failures without anyone noticing, partly because we had prepared to operate in the face of those failures since we knew there was no way to fix them beforehand. It was a tremendous decentralized propaganda coup. No one wanted to be the company that failed as a result, the potential liability alone was massive.

The idea that what was averted was minor is a pretty naive take. I was genuinely surprised that we actually managed to hold some of the disasters together long enough — out of sight and out of mind — to fix them without anyone noticing critical systems were offline for months. IT was a bit more glitchy, slow, and unavailable back then, so the excuses were more plausible.

[macintux]

> Some bad things happened but not on a catastrophic level that warranted the level of investment that was put into Y2K projects.

Possibly the catastrophic things were prioritized and fixed?

[DougN7]

Do you have any data at all to support your claim?