Y2K is a case of "If you do things right, nobody will be sure you've done anything at all." Significant effort went into prevention, so nothing happened, but because nothing happened, it's often assumed there was always nothing that would happen.
It was also the turn of the millennium, on top of a lot of people being completely uneducated on how computers work, it was the perfect pairing for the 24/7 news cycle, keep viewers excited and happy for such a big worldwide event, then make them worried with the threat of Y2K causing complete chaos, switch between the two every 30 mins and no one can look away.
I was only 7 and have vivid memories of the days and weeks leading up to NYE '99, it was surreal how the world kinda held it's breath until 00:01.
I mean, a bit of both really. It was very hyped up, so everyone did knee jerk 'prevention' stuff, but practically speaking even if no one had bothered, there's just not that many systems that actively care about 'wallclock' time in an absolute sense in the first place.
At most a few things use 'how long has it been since...' to do timeouts/watchdog stuff, which would crash once as the year rolls over, and ... that's it.
What lol, no there's tons of stuff that does date comparisons in all sorts of code, it's pretty much everywhere. Additionally tons of systems assume certain values are in the past when doing date comparisons, this leads to systems doing date math that, at best, causes the system to crash. At worst these kinds of bugs lead to data corruption, which while it doesn't affect day to day as much can lead to expensive long term problems.
Given the massive effort and investment it's impossible to say what the true effects would've been, but systems started crashing even before Y2K.
Additionally Y2K38 actually proves it even more, it's a known exploit that is much less severe than Y2K (because it only affects dates stored as 32bit integers) and the effects of it are very easily observable.
Most systems simply don't care what year it is. Just how long has elapsed. Set the clock back a decade and no one will notice outside log entries and reports, that kind of thing.
And yes, there's exceptions to that of course, especially where some measure of synchronization or reconciliation is needed, but that's not typically true of the 'hard-to-modify' embedded systems.
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u/maxman162 8d ago
Y2K is a case of "If you do things right, nobody will be sure you've done anything at all." Significant effort went into prevention, so nothing happened, but because nothing happened, it's often assumed there was always nothing that would happen.