I saw this title on a 2nd hand book stall and had to buy it! Actually Sarah spotted it and pointed it out to me and it brought back a flood of memories from five years ago. I was chief engineer at Resolution at the time and suffered a daily pestering by various "Y2K consultants" from the Beeb et al. To a man (no ladies were stupid enough to be sucked in to that degree!) they were clearly riding a gravy train that they were going to suck dry! I'd upgraded every OS and bit of application software as per manufacturer recommendations but that wasn't enough - no sir!

"Is that combination door lock Y2k compliant?"
"No - it's a mechanical gadget that has no notion of the date"
"That's not good enough - if you guys are going to get BBC/Channel 4/etc etc millennium certification you're going to have to provide me with manufacturer documentation to show it is compliant"

Suffice to say we sailed through the 1999-2000 junction with no problems - I'd simulated it twice at Resolution (and once at my previous firm Oasis TV) - but that kind of level-headed thinking cut no mustard with the folks from the Y2k industry!

Anyhow - I noticed some interesting trends in the run up to 2000 - aside from the hundreds of books by doom-mongers like Mr Wiles (have these people ever been taken seriously since?) there were well defined attitudes in all the people who wanted the world to end by the close of 1999

• Once people had woken up to the fact that programmers had been addressing the issue for most of the nineties and databases are used to badly formatted input the danger turned to "embedded systems" - everything from your car's electronic ignition to nuclear missiles were going to go wrong. All the people I spoke to wouldn't accept the fact that most microcoontrollers know nothing about large time periods - your engine management operates over hundreds of milliseconds (or at most months for the service interval). The view of engineers who dealt with embedded controllers on a daily basis counted for nothing over the views of the doom merchants.
  
• By mid-1998 it was fashionable for the Y2k industry to imply that although the USA would be OK all those Johnny foreigner countries would cause the trouble - racism was everywhere! In the end Italy spent less than 1% of what the UK spent on Y2k preparedness and they suffered less than our modest amount of pain!
  
• In the aftermath of new year 2000 I read lots of online comments from people like Gary North claiming that the US administration was covering up the nature of the problem and we'd see the collapse of society etc etc soon - perhaps he is still holed up in a cave in Montana living on beef jerky and listening to his clockwork radio!

So there you go - a real trip down misery lane!