For promoting the Y2K fear.
Y2K stands for: [Y]ou’ve got [2] be [K]idding!
In 1996, McGraw-Hill Publishers changed the name of a 1984 nonfiction book and rereleased it as The Year 2000 Computing Crisis. The book took as its focus the number of software programs that stored years as two digits instead of four—for example, 99 instead of 1999—and discussed the potentially devastating effects this would have on our computer-run world when the clocks rolled over at midnight at the turn of the millennium and long-working computer systems broke down. As most of you well know, it was blown more than slightly out of proportion. So if you are still in your bomb shelter, you can come out now. It was all a hoax.
If FDR were alive in the late nineties, he would have revised his statement to say, “We have nothing to fear but Y2K itself!” The whole world thought we would be swallowed by a black hole and transported to some Amish farm in Ohio when the ball dropped for the new millennium. Many stocked up on food, water, and guns waiting for the apocalyptic computer meltdown. If you weren’t at least a little scared, you were lying. Some even withdrew their life savings from their banks and hid it under their ammunition crates (little did they know they were eight years too early).
The showdown between the modern world and a couple of forgotten computer code digits was quite anticlimactic. The only winners in the cyber-war were a couple of overstocked army surplus stores, a bunch of pocket-protector-wearing techies, and, of course, McGraw-Hill. About the only thing that happed was that London’s Millennium Wheel failed to operate (but for unrelated reasons). Thanks for the good times!