Y2K Disaster?

Even now, 8 years after the millennium, I keep reading that the only Y2K disaster was the fact that so many companies bought into the issue, and piled hundreds of thousands of pounds into fixing it. I remember that for quite some years afterwards, there were many articles jeering at these so-called "morons" for buying into the hype, and sending their money gurgling down the drain of the consultants pockets.

What I don't see is anyone actually defending much of this spend. OK - yes, there were some jokers insisting that your washing machine, tumble dryer, dishwasher and even your toaster were going to be affected by this move from '99 to '00. Thankfully most people were above such panic (although there were sad, sad stories of people actually "upgrading" their white goods because they had been suckered into believing that they'd stop working at midnight on 1999!) and were able to see that it wouldn't matter what year your white goods thought it was, because it'll function just as well in 1900 as 2000.

What did matter were many database systems where the year information had been stored as a two digit number instead of a 4 digit number. It's very simple, but there was a hell of a lot of data out there with just that problem, and the companies who had such databases paid to make sure they were up to date by the end of 1999. There were other systems where the year mattered, and these were updated too. The reason the "millennium bug" failed to bring the world to its knees was because so many companies had paid so much money to ensure that systems would NOT cause problems.

I worry, in retrospect, about claims that aircraft would fall out of the sky because they'd suddenly stop working on the dot of midnight 1999. Even now, I just can't see how this could possibly have been an issue. HOW would this have worked? If I change the date in my PC back to January 1900 (actually, the internal clock wont let me go back further than 1980), is my computer going to suddenly think - "Oh my God! They didn't have computers back in 1900! I can't work any more."? Well, let's look at this logically - I'd be thrilled if my computer started thinking at all! But computer systems don't, as yet, have any kind of awareness save what we've programmed into them, so, no, I think it unlikely my computer would worry about the fact that computers hadn't been invented in 1900. Similarly, I'd be prepared to bet that no aircraft would have any kind of programming which would give said aircraft cause to worry that no-one was able to fly back in 1900, so it shouldn't be able to fly either. I can see no reason to have year information in the programming of an aircraft at all. That said, I bet Airforce 1 has some pretty fancy software!

Has it ever occurred to these people who now dismiss the whole Y2K bug theory as having been a load of old hokum, that the reason it didn't hit us nastily was because it was part hokum, and part preparation.