Top 10 Panics!

There may not be an original joke left to make about the Y2K pandemonium — that's how ridiculous this global panic ended up being. At the stroke of midnight at the turn of the millennium, our computers were supposed to kill us all. Or something like that.

Chalk it up to shortsightedness: computer programmers had long notated years with only two digits — 97, 98, 99 and so forth — apparently never considering what would happen in the year 2000, when the date would revert back to year 00. Would the machines recognize the new number? Would they freeze up? Would they fundamentally and irrevocably crash, taking us back to the year zero with them? Panicked prognosticators predicted airplanes would fall from the sky, electrical grids would shut down and the planet's entire information infrastructure would grind to a halt. Countries like the U.S. and United Kingdom spent millions to patch and fix the error while others took a wait-and-see approach.

There wasn't much to see. As the clock struck midnight in Asia and Sydney was still standing, the rest of the world breathed a collective sigh of relief. As the festivities rolled on, there were few glitches: a row of slot machines went out in Delaware and a few dates appeared wrong on the Web, but that's indicative of the extent of it. The morning of January 1, 2000 dawned to a world now much more concerned about their hangovers than death by computer glitch.

Read a Joel Stein column about the aftermath of Y2K.