Yup. I personally patched an air traffic control system that would invariably crash because of Y2K - in other words without the patch, there was no ATC... Som

Yup. I personally patched an air traffic control system that would invariably crash because of Y2K - in other words without the patch, there was no ATC... Some people miss this - the only thing we were doing with that date was showing it onscreen. But someone had written code into a fixed length buffer, expecting the year to only be two digits long, and that year was calculated as (current-year - 1900), so when 2000 ticked around, boom! Buffer overflow, system crashes and you're screwed. It went from being a minor bug to being a system destroyer. The problem was real, and even if the patch to fix it wasn't rocket science, it still took time to track down the problems. Much of the affected code was more than 20 years old, and no-one had looked at it or even compiled it in years. Bringing that code back to life to be able to insert a fix was no small issue that could be corrected in the middle of a crisis. Multiply that by all of the other potentially critical systems, such as power transmission, medical equipment, factory plant, and you're staring down the barrel of a potential disaster. I don't understand why some people today want to pretend that there wasn't ever a real problem for Y2K - I saw failing systems with my own eyes.