Fake news is probably harsh, but it did seem exaggerated. So I'm curious were the patches mostly precautionary or did people actually take said systems and run

Fake news is probably harsh, but it did seem exaggerated. So I'm curious were the patches mostly precautionary or did people actually take said systems and run them on different clocks to see what actually happens to them when the time rolls over. I was much younger back then so my take on it all was pretty simplistic, but did people demonstrate actual program crashes and what not in some reproducible manner?