So much for the catastrophe, right? On New Year's Eve, the clock struck midnight and everyone heaved a sigh of relief. Or at least we'd like to say that, but in reality, very few people seemed worried enough about the Y2K bug to be relieved. The most strife we witnessed while walking through downtown Boston after midnight involved a cabbie arguing with his passengers over the fare. No looting, no pillaging, no terrorist attacks-- in fact, the biggest net effect of Y2K would appear to be this: there are now a whole lot of people with a six-month supply of Beefaroni in their basements who are feeling just a little bit foolish right about now.

That's not to say that Y2K didn't cause some very real problems, but earlier in the day we watched the reports of New Year's clicking over in Japan, China, and even India with no major infrastructure failures. Later we were struck with just one thought: if the power had gone out in the U.S., it would have been pretty damn embarrassing. No, all major systems continued to work just fine, and since the world was not deprived of electricity, water, or any other basic needs (any more than usual, anyway), we found we could turn our attention to the single most prevalent Y2K bug out there: goofy cosmetic date problems. All over the world, computers continued to function just fine-- except they often reported the new year as anything ranging from 00 (which we consider correct) to 100 to 19100 and beyond. It's true-- lots of software really doesn't know what year it is. As it turns out, though, it wasn't all that big a deal.

Still, it was fun to tour the 'net and see what year different companies' servers thought it was. The Register has what appears to be almost a canonical list of Y2K dates errors on the web. Hewlett Packard's site was arguably the most entertaining, temporarily showing a date of "January 1, ***DATE INVALID***." Microsoft's Terraserver site was really cool, originally claiming the year to be 19100, but then being "fixed" to say 192000 instead-- and when last we checked, it was reading 100. But hey, don't get too smug-- even Apple's web site thought it was 20100 until an embarrassed webmaster pulled the clock down completely.

So Happy New Year, everybody, and welcome to the year 20100. Join us as we give thanks that the Y2K bug was relatively minor. As for how Y2K most affected your friendly neighborhood AtAT staff, Jack's still bummed about a Y2K bug in AtAT's server software that's delaying AtAT 2.0 even further, while Katie, AtAT's resident fact checker and Goddess of Minutiae, is still reeling from the injustice of having been made to pay cash for a manicure when the salon's credit card system failed. The horror... The horror...