Why did PCs & mainframes handle the Y2K rollover just fine despite alarmists' predictions of global disaster?

Question

Why did PCs & mainframes handle the Y2K rollover just fine despite alarmists' predictions of global disaster?

Answer 1

Because of people working overtime and late into the night to resolve the issue before it became a disaster.

Answer 2

It was a forecasted possibility.    However, I do have programs, pre 2000, that do not work because of the date.   Fortunately they are mainly "Word type" programs.

Answer 3

I think the real question is "why did people listen to all of the alarmists' predictions of global disaster, when the IT community had the situation well in hand years in advance?"

Anyone in the software development field knew well in advance of problems caused by 2-digit-year dates.  The only real problems would have been in so-called "legacy applications", for which the source code had long ago been lost.  The rest was just a matter of finding all references to dates.  (And even then, unless you are comparing two dates, it wouldn't matter.)

Some people/companies/etc. went so far overboard in requiring "Y2K certification" that they even required vendors of non-electronic equipment to certify that they were "Y2K compliant".

- kb -