[mcswell]

"... a lot of snarky articles written about how certain countries or companies were not Y2K ready..." I know you're talking about articles written after Jan 1, 2000. But there were a lot of articles written before then that were Jeremiah doomsday articles, so the snarky articles were reacting in part to equally wrong articles before then.

One article I recall in particular was in Scientific American some time in (IIRC) 1998 or early 1999. It prophesied (I use that word intentionally) that no matter how much money and effort was put into fixing the problem ahead of time, there would be all kinds of Bad Things happening on January 1. It called out in particular computers that were said to be unreachable, like hundreds of feet underwater on oil platforms. (Whether there actually were such computers, I don't know.) There was a sort of chart with the X-axis being effort spent on preventing the problem and the Y-axis being the scale of the resulting disaster. The graph leveled off while still in the "disaster" range, but still presented a clear message: "Give us more money and we can prevent catastrophes".

Somehow I haven't been able to find that article. Maybe SciAm suppressed it when the outcome turned out to be way short of a disaster.

There was also a TV (remember that?) news site or three that planned coverage beginning on midnight December 31 somewhere in Europe (Russia and China were off the map, I don't remember about Japan). Of course the news was that there was no news. (Yes, there were some computer programs that died or spit out junk, but nothing rising to the level of news.) I think it was an hour or two after midnight Eastern Time (US) that they ended the news cast.

Was there a Y2K problem? Of course. But it was largely taken care of before January 1, 2000, Y2K Jeremiahs notwithstanding.