the only thing i feel intuitively sure about is that y2-ok was *not* the result of heroically overburdened IT people doing a fantastic job-- even though there may have been cases in which they did just that. in the large view human systems just don't operate that way outside of comic books. it seems way more likely to me that the magnitude of potential problems was blown vastly out of proportion to begin with. call it part profiteering by software folks (even tho a great many of them were genuinely alarmed), part pre-millennial panic, part metaphoric evocation of a social and economic system that's seemed awfully shaky on its pins for a long while now... i'm sure everybody has a premise or two to add on the sociological side.
as a technological scare-story, it sure made a great yarn. the more i learned about these systems, the more sense it made. but once you got into november and december and nothing was happening--most computer systems have look-ahead features of various sorts that trigger rollover features in advance of the actual date--it was pretty evident that nothing much was going to.
this might be one of those stories where the posthumous media analysis is more interesting than the phenomenon itself.
-----Original Message----- From: owner-lbo-talk at lists.panix.com [mailto:owner-lbo-talk at lists.panix.com]On Behalf Of Doug Henwood Sent: Monday, January 03, 2000 11:06 AM To: lbo-talk at lists.panix.com Subject: Y2-nuthin'?
Hey, so all you Y2K Chicken Littles out there - what happened? Too early to tell? Massive media coverup? Successful work by thousands of feverish programmers?
Doug