Phew! Glad that outburst of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds is over in Copenhagen.
I can get on with planting my Tulip Bulbs in anticipation of global warming and a bumper crop. So long as the Millenium Bug doesn't get them.
For those young and tender readers, the Millenium Bug was a supposed computer problem... the idea that early computer programmes expressed the year in only two digits, not four.
Everything was supposed to crash on the dot of midnight as we entered the year 2000.
Governments set up commissions, journalists waxed hysterical, billions were spent, the BBC warned us that everything from the trains to people's pacemakers could stop...
Then.... nothing happened.
Over to Wikipedia: While no globally significant computer failures occurred when the clocks rolled over into 2000, preparation for the Y2K bug had a significant effect on the computer industry. Countries that spent very little on tackling the Y2K bug (including Italy and South Korea) experienced as few problems as those that spent much more (such as the United Kingdom and the United States), causing some to question whether the absence of computer failures was the result of the preparation undertaken or whether the
significance of the problem had been overstated.
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