Look, I work in the software industry, and my company spent a lot of money making sure that Y2K wasn't a big deal. We made hospital software. But there was more critical software out there, and it received similar attention. It wasn't a hoax. Were some people OVERLY paranoid? Yes. Would nothing have gone wrong? Not a chance. Things DID go wrong, but due to the effort taken by many, many programmers, the problems were quite minimal. Yay.