I saw in the new millennium in the control room of an electricity distribution company, with a plastic cup of warm, flat lemonade in my hand.
:(
Much to our relief, everything worked, but that was not luck, it was the result of a huge amount of bloody hard work. We even pulled old radios that we knew were completely indifferent to date and time out of storage and put a set (with a faultman in attendance) in every major substation, so we could manually operate the network in extremis.
IIRC, the patches to certify Windows NT 3.51 only came out very late, maybe in September 1999. This caused a bit of stress as our accountants had bought a billing system that depended on NT3.51. The IT folks were only told of its existence in June or July 1999
Yes, there were rorts: a local council's water folks were able to justify a big stand-alone backup generator at their principal pumping site "in case the grid went down because Y2K". This was actually just a perfectly reasonable contingency plan, but the councillors had never bought it until Y2K
Biting the hand that feeds IT
