Non-event, or disaster averted? Rows still rage over millennium bug

On New Year's Eve 25 years ago, sane people worried that the modern world could be about to melt down.

- Simon Goodley Richard Nelsson

The "millennium bug" seemed to be threatening to crash the world's computer systems, as technology struggled to distinguish between the years 1900 and 2000. The public, faced with daily predictions of potentially terrible outcomes, braced themselves nervously.

Dark jokes prevailed about avoiding being on "a life-support system at midnight on 31 December 1999". In China, Zhao Be, then the head of the country's millennium bug coordination efforts, commanded airline executives to be on a flight at the start of 1 January 2000 to demonstrate that any problems had been sorted out.

In the end, nobody appeared to perish. And the same might be said of some of the earlier events to reveal the existence of the bug, which was also known as Y2K.

In 1987 Marks & Spencer received a batch of tinned meat that was rejected because the company's computers thought it was almost 90 years past its January 2000 use-by date. Five years later, a Minnesota kindergarten invited one Mary Bandar to join its classes. She was 104 at the time.