Today on Twitter there’s a tag-meme, #10yearsago. It’s not all that unexpected, given that we’re coming up on another round-number year, but it has special significance to many, because, of course, in 2000, there was a chance that we were facing the End of the World as we Knew It™.

We were wrong, of course, but not far wrong. The disaster we all expected never came to pass, but 21 months later, a different chain of events really did sort of change the shape of our world rather significantly.

But I digress.

On the off chance that someone reading this was living on a desert island that year, or was simply too young to remember, here’s a quick summary of what was generally called the Y2K problem:

Many older computer programs represented the date by allocating two digits for the year, and assuming the “19″ prefix. As a result, on 1 January 2000, any uncorrected or un-replaced software would suddenly think it was 1900CE, not 2000CE ¹. There were many doom-and-gloom scenarios spun for exactly how this could cause widespread malfunctions in programs that depended on knowing the actual date.

In the end, of course, Y2K fizzled. There were a couple of glitches here and there, but no widespread disaster. The reason was not so much that the problem was overblown, as that the alarm was raised with just enough time to spare.

Now, keep in mind, lots of people–geeky people, that is–knew about this problem for decades. The people who wrote the programs knew about the problem, but assumed that their software would never run for so long that it would actually be a problem. But somehow, the mundane world had missed the problem entirely. Then newspapers started covering it, and suddenly it was all anyone could talk about.

Usually, this sort of thing just makes geeks roll their eyes, of course, but in this case, it was important. Until the media believed in the problem, the people who actually make decisions about how to spend various company’s resources didn’t know–or could pretend they didn’t know–about the problem, which is why the problem hadn’t already been fixed. Lots of people had spent years just sort of shrugging it off, procrastinating, and insisting they had better things to do…until suddenly it was a Big Apocalyptic Deal.

Then, of course, came the frenzy of predictions that the End of the World, or at least of civilization was Nigh (which, you know, a nice round number like 2000 was already going to attract, because people are loonies that way). Everything digital was going to break and the sky was going to fall.

Except, of course, it didn’t. Precisely because everyone went a little crazy about it. Suddenly there was a booming market for COBOL programmers who had been gathering dust for 20 years, hired or contracted to crack open code that nobody had actually looked at since dinosaurs were soft and rocks roamed the Earth. Or else, long delayed conversions to systems that didn’t date from the age when vacuum tubes were the height of progress were finally brought forward and made to happen.

And so, Y2K turned out to be a bit of a dud, and all of us geeks were simultaneously relieved…and perhaps just slightly disappointed. Geeks love things to be interesting, and there are few things that would be more interesting than an actual dislocation due to widespread technological failure. Of course, if that happened, the peasants would march would pitchforks and torches and the geeks would be the ones they were looking to fork and burn, but it would at least have been interesting!

But no, in the end, New Year’s Day, 2000CE turned out to be rather mundanely like the New Year’s Days that had proceeded it, which is to say, headachy and over-sensitive to bright lights and loud noises and hoping that nobody actually got pictures of you with the lampshade on your head.

And really, I suppose that’s OK.

Happy New Year, everyone!