Yo Todd, I was just joking about the "u."

The issue with Y2K was massively overblown. My aunt worked as a programmer in the industry most affected by it (finance) starting in the 60s and 70s when the initial reason for the issue existed.

I work in the process industry. We were less affected by the age of the software but much more by the danger if something went wrong. By the late 80s and early 90s the initial cause was no longer an issue.

The main point is that the Y2K issue didn't "sneak up on us." It was super-easy to detect, and in most cases super easy to fix: You redefine a 2-character date as 4. Initialize it. Check/create rollover for century and not just year. That's it.

You already have to have logic for year rollover, so you only need to check what - if anything - is necessary for a century rollover.

We never had an issue with our software created in the 90s because by then dates weren't defined as 2 characters anymore. Of course, we checked, but we're talking hours and days of work, not days and weeks per site.

There were an ENORMOUS number of scammers that jacked their prices up massively to be "experts" fixing the issue. This hurt the entire software industry afterward as customers realized they had been scammed or companies had tried to scam them. Big companies were then more cautious about doing maintenance and upgrades that were necessary or beneficial because they were afraid they were being scammed again.

I did see some karma in my industry as known Y2k "chicken littles" had real problems selling services afterwards because companies didn't trust the companies as much who had milked that trust to get big Y2K contracts.