Couldn't agree more - Y2K was an unsurpassed example of a minor problem being expanded into a vast money generating scare.

In the years leading up to 1/1/2000 I was the IT manager for a medium sized company. Since all our systems were relatively new there was simply no way any of the PC's or software could be affected by the truncated date formats. Nevertheless we were required to spend significant hours writing reports for suppliers and customers assuring them that we weren't going to fall over on 1/1/00. Managers were simply terrified that they were going to be blamed for not addressing a problem which they didn't understand and which, they were assured, could be fixed by simply passing monies over to those who did understand the problem.

One group of aquaintances made a motza from the scare by writing a programme they called "Utility 10000". They would evaluate a company's system for a minor fee and then (surprisingly) find massive Y2K problems. The company, sufficently terrified, would then be assured that Utility 10000 would rectifiy all problems - for an appropriate fee. And what did Utilty 10000 do? It counted backwards from 10000 to 1, impressively displaying the countdown on-screen with the payer being told this number represented the checks and rectifications that the programme was doing. In fact it did nothing other than display the count onscreen.

At the end of the process the company was given a certificate saying that it was fully Y2K compliant which was in fact true.

Leading up to 1/1/2000 I assumed that, when none of the disasters forecast occurred, the perpetrators of this scam would be exposed and held to account - or at least held to ridicule. That nothing of the sort occurred remains a puzzle to me.

If it was a swindle, some of the largest IT and accounting services providers to government were involved in it and in advising the replacement of software and hardware that followed.

Some of these contractors are presently providing IT audit and general audit services to government, having succeeded in dislodging the previous internal audit departments.

Wasn't the outsourcing of IT, IT audit and general audit services a priority of the Coalition government? Why didn't these so-called reputable contractors advise government of Y2K over-servicing and fraud - because fraud is it is if the allegations are correct. What is the Government's Auditor General doing about these allegations?

Genuine Y2K problems existed all over the place. They were rarely problems with they way dates were *stored* in widely-available and widely-tested commercial software, but with the way date differences were *calculated* in lazily-written bespoke code that was often used only in one way and only by (sometimes numerous employees of) the one customer. The problem code was likely written in COBOL or proprietary programming languages like Clipper or dBaseIV or Visual Basic macros embedded in spreadsheets, not by madly-optimising 1960s mainframe hackers or by software houses still in business but in the 1980s by long-defunct local vendors or a couple of in-house people who had long since left not only the company but the country.

Some fraud might have been perpetrated by consultants pretending to fix nonexistent problems, but if their clients were really so ignorant as they felt themselves to be when engaging exorbitant contractors to take responsibility for a simple problem, it would have been next-to-impossible to track them down. Whistleblowers might have made a difference, but I didn't hear of any in 2000-2001 when it would have counted.

I had an incredibly mind-numbing job for a few months of 1999 doing the manual equivalent of counting down from 10000 to 1. The software I was testing had been part of vital communications equipment for decades, and had had some genuine Y2K problems (fixed before I started testing), so the job made sense and "had to be done" even if I was bored silly.

Except that the tested Y2K-compliant version of the system was never adopted -- the customer bought an entirely different system instead, from a foreign supplier.

Chris has invented a history that didn't happen, where have we seen that before. As someone who worked on miltary systems for Y2K I can tell you that there was some very real problems that had to be fixed. I just so you know I work for one of the largest IT companies in the world. We had to fix many problems with our internal systems if the problem didn't exist why did we spend millions fix our own systems? The libs a living on a different planet.

The following question is posed..."There has been much comparison between Y2K and global warming of late, so can parallels be drawn and lessons learnt?"...but not answered. I personally fail to see the logical connection between Y2K and climate change, even if we accept the account give here. The argument seems to be...look at Y2K it was a disaster story acting as a rort so maybe climate change is a disaster story acting as a rort...one could also say...religion is a disaster story acting as a rort so climate change is also a rort...but no member of the Liberal party would dare so argue...if that's the argument then notice it is clearly fallacious...so the answer to the question "can parallels be drawn"?... is no without a proper examination of climate change science itself...the proper way to make this argument then would be precisely backwards...start with climate and then talk Y2K.

This article is just rubbish. What Chris fails to understand, despite having a Bachelor's and Master's degree, is that software tends to hang around for a long time.

The legacy systems that Chris dismisses so blithely were, in most cases the backbones of most business IT systems. In the 80s I was installing and modifying accounting software that had been written in the 70s and was still running in the mid-90s. It was riddled with y2k. In the late 80s and early 90s I was working on some of the big banking systems. They had been around for decades and they too were full of y2k bugs.

There was lots of work that had to be done to check legacy systems and modify them accordingly. Yes, the fix was simple enough (in most cases) but there was so much code to check. There probably were some shysters out there, but Y2K was a real problem.

I have no doubt that the work put into Y2K was a success. Trying to claim it was a fraud and make some obscure point about global warming has to be one of the silliest things I've heard in ages.