Y2K was the name of a computer bug. A lot of software written in the twentieth century would only store two digits for the year, i.e. 1980 would be stored as "80". Unfortunately, when the calendar rolled over to January 1, 2000, this software would now think the date was January 1, 1900 (or in some rare cases, January 1, 19100).
This would cause all kinds of things to go crazy; alarms might not go off, or they'd all go off at once. Bills might be shown as a century overdue (with a zillion dollars in late charges), or they might not work at all. We were afraid that subtle bugs might be lurking in critical infrastructure, like medical equipment, airplane autopilots, power plants, nuclear reactors, and so forth. The world was running on computers in a way that really hadn't been anticipated over the prior decades, and the software had been written back in a day when we were sure most of it would be replaced long before the two digit years became an issue (it wasn't).
In the end, almost nothing happened. Not because the bugs weren't there, and not because they weren't serious, but rather because companies spent enormous time and effort to fix them in advance. The last few years of the nineties were filled with consultants promising to fix your software for you, and massive efforts to test "Y2K compliance." The important stuff got fixed, a few issues had to be patched, and the world kept on rotating on its axis. It was a non-event, because we handled it adequately.
It was quite popular to point out, during the nineties, that the twenty-first century technically didn't start until 2001*; 2000 was the final year of the twentieth century. After the panic and subsequent relief surrounding the Y2K bug, however, 2000 was treated as the real milestone. We'd survived, and the future had arrived intact. 2001 was just not as big a deal.
* This is because we started counting years from A.D. 1. The year prior was called 1 B.C. And this, in turn, was because we hadn't invented zero yet. Compared to our system for counting years, zero is a fairly modern invention. There was no year zero.
This would cause all kinds of things to go crazy; alarms might not go off, or they'd all go off at once. Bills might be shown as a century overdue (with a zillion dollars in late charges), or they might not work at all. We were afraid that subtle bugs might be lurking in critical infrastructure, like medical equipment, airplane autopilots, power plants, nuclear reactors, and so forth. The world was running on computers in a way that really hadn't been anticipated over the prior decades, and the software had been written back in a day when we were sure most of it would be replaced long before the two digit years became an issue (it wasn't).
In the end, almost nothing happened. Not because the bugs weren't there, and not because they weren't serious, but rather because companies spent enormous time and effort to fix them in advance. The last few years of the nineties were filled with consultants promising to fix your software for you, and massive efforts to test "Y2K compliance." The important stuff got fixed, a few issues had to be patched, and the world kept on rotating on its axis. It was a non-event, because we handled it adequately.
It was quite popular to point out, during the nineties, that the twenty-first century technically didn't start until 2001*; 2000 was the final year of the twentieth century. After the panic and subsequent relief surrounding the Y2K bug, however, 2000 was treated as the real milestone. We'd survived, and the future had arrived intact. 2001 was just not as big a deal.
* This is because we started counting years from A.D. 1. The year prior was called 1 B.C. And this, in turn, was because we hadn't invented zero yet. Compared to our system for counting years, zero is a fairly modern invention. There was no year zero.
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