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This is a great post and very timely. Thank you.

Clarke, he must have been the one pushing catastrophe over Y2K, that never happened.

"Clarke, he must have been the one pushing catastrophe over Y2K, that never happened."

The fact that the "catastrophe" did not materialize is actually a credit the efforts against Cyber-wars.

A VERY short lesson in COBOL (main language used by 99% of business software at the time)
ALL years were stored as 2-digit numbers (COBOL is an old but excellent language) It was a fact that computers are stupid. ask a computer directly what 4 divided by 2 is - the answer it gives is NOT 2, but 1.999999999999.....ad infinitum.

So what? Well, think about this ... the #1 corporate accounting software was written in COBOL ... this includes Inventory, shipping, receiving, Order Entry, etc etc...

So?? If the corrections were NOT completed by Jan 1 2000, the system would have locked up or miscalculated. Orders would not be placed, orders would not be fulfilled, shipping would be blocked, there would be general mayhem.

This would have been a minor inconvenience for those of us lucky enough to live in smaller cities and towns since systems are not as automated. There is also enough local storage to handle minor glitches.

BUT! The cities would have been in total chaos - food would have run out within 24 hours (panic & stupidity) - add the further problems of trash (ask NYC) water, sewer, all of it would have been over taxed and probably failed.

During WWII in Europe, people in the cities were starving to death, but if you walked out of town for a mile or two, food was plentiful - the metro-mentality - dependent on others completely with no sense of survival.

All for the want of the nail, was the nation lost.

Clarke, he must have been the one pushing catastrophe over Y2K, that never happened

I was thinking the exact thing while reading this story