Rod at work (10/24/2016)
I'm old enough to have been working in the IT field during the whole Y2K "event". Major decisions were put off because of it. A lot of work preparing DR plans was done. (And that was a good thing.) But at the end of the day our systems were fine because we didn't save date/time data in text fields using YYMMDD format. Instead we depended upon our vendors (in our case, Microsoft) getting it right in their databases and applications. And we just made sure that we were up to date in everything. It was an awful lot of hype, but it was just largely hype. I remember hearing a week or so after Y2K that some military systems experienced at outage (and was kept very secret), but for the most part it was a non-event. I do think that perhaps it was a non-event in large part because so many IT folks took it seriously and fixed potential problems in their systems.
Heh... I'm old enough to say that I first starting writing Y2K compatible code in 1976, which is also when I first started writing real deployable code. When 1999 came along, I had to fill out paper work to answer the PUC for 48 of the 50 states because I worked in the telephone business in 1999. One of the questions that they asked on each form (and you couldn't just staple a rote answer to the forms) was "What have you spent the most time on in your preparations for Y2K"? My answer was "Filling out these stupid forms".
As you say, except for filling out form after bloody form, it was a non-event for us.
--Jeff Moden
Change is inevitable... Change for the better is not.