The late Igor was laughing about Y2K before it ever happened. He said he could never understand why programmers didn’t go beyond 1999 to begin with. Since he was well versed in Boolean and COBOL and a few others, he would know. I still wonder, since he made it two months into 2000, if he ever laughed at the scramble and wished he were capable (quadriplegic by then) of helping to fix the problem.
One comedian opined, "The developers all shortened the name of the problem from 'Year two thousand' to 'Y2K'. Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't that how we got into this problem in the first place?"
I'm sure the genesis of the problem is all the code that was written on the original 8-bit computers where memory and storage space cost TONS. When anyone suggested a change before the Y2K crisis it was "too expensive" to figure out how all that old code worked and where the changes needed to be made.