The Y2K “bug” was a serious data and infrastructure issue impacting nearly all technology coming into the end of the 1990’s.

The main reason is that from the 1960’s and forward memory wasn’t just expensive, it just didn’t exist for systems in the scale that you may be used to today. In the mid-to-late 1980’s 64k of RAM was a standard for desktop computers and if you wanted to expand that you might be able to buy 1MB and by 1990 2MB-4MB was an exotic premium.

Beyond cost and construction the #1 limiting factor was the CPUs on these early systems. They literally didn’t have the capability to address RAM in large quantities, so early on you augmented the RAM with tricks that offloaded information to the computers storage medium (we still do this even today with Swap memory on modern PCs but that’s a practical solution to not enough RAM, not the CPU anymore).

Also storage mediums were a huge expense too. In the late 80’s a 10MB (MegaByte! Not GigaByte) hard-drive for an Apple //e was well over $1000, and even with the best hardware you couldn’t actually utilize all of the 10MB as one volume. Enterprise HDs for servers were in the 5-6 figures, easily.

So when you wrote a program that needed a database, every single byte cost you hard dollars. Either in the RAM or storage. So doing things like only storing the last two digits of the year was THE standard practice up until the early 90’s as a practical cost solution. Why spend money on storing the bytes “1” “9” on every single year when that’s just wasted space.

So, all of a sudden all these systems were looking at a situation where when the year 2000 hit they would all roll back to 1900. This wasn’t speculation, this was the core crisis. Suddenly untold number of programs doing calculations on “date greater that 19XX” would suddenly report, NO. This impacted banking, finance, government records, *everything*. And many times it was not just software but embedded systems and that hardware just had to go in the trash.

The industry pulled together behind the scenes and globally replaced hardware and software across the spectrum to meet the challenge. Staggering amounts of money were spent and people put in 80-100+ hours a week of labor to fix it and the fact that we passed over that threshold without serious issues should be celebrated not minimized as a “scare”.