As one of those who spent nearly a decade in the trenches preparing for that “non-existent bug,” more aptly called a serious lack of forethought, I take serious umbrage at your flippancy.

While the NSF policy of replacing all their stuff that was not provable as Y2K compliant was ridiculous (A VCR with no year field in its clock, for instance, is inherently any-year compliant; fortunately they didn’t toss all their furniture and dishes as well) there were some extremely serious issues to be resolved.

I’ll grant you that there was a great deal of pontificating, and that the depredations of the “experts” are hard to overstate, but the blokes behind the scenes were, are and deserve better than a casual dismissal.

That Y2K was not the End of all Civilisation was not the proof of a negative (a logical impossibility) that you make it out to be, but rather was the result of countless person-years spent mitigating it.

We did our part, and we did it with little thanks, no impressive memorials erected in our collective honour and with the ignorant laughing in our faces.

Please laugh in some other direction.

Russ Bixby, Curmudgeon of the plains.

“Why is there an expiration date on buttermilk?”

I actually owe much to those of you who worked tirelessly on a solution–and to expiration dates on buttermilk.

Speaking of oxymorons–What do you call a bad lemon?

That said, I do apologise for my thin skin on this subject. I took a Hell of a lot of ribbing on 1st January 2000 and have taken much since, and it does eventually wear one down.

Ah, well; nusquam licitum inritus irritus attero.

Russ

Zen network engineer: “What’s the bandwidth of localhost?”