5 years ago: Terms of Y2K bill agreed upon

30.06.99: The US government and consumer groups agree on terms of a bill to protect companies against Y2K-related lawsuits.

The legislation gives IT firms 90 days to fix millennium bug-related problems before customers are allowed to file suit and imposes caps on how much injured parties can be awarded.

Consumer groups complain that law is too corporate-friendly, as it affords companies immunity from prosecution.

30.06.04: The rolling over of the calendar from 1999 to 2000 was, of course, a major disaster that brought computer networks and city infrastructures to their knees and created havoc among world populations including riots and blackouts.

No - wait - that was just the hype. In reality the new millennium started out quiet as can be.

It now seems hard to remember how great the millennium hysteria was in the late 1990s, especially for IT. So many vendors selling snake-oil Y2K solutions and loads of articles written and laws past... all for what will perhaps turn out to be the anticlimax of the century.

Some computer work needed to be done in order to avoid meltdowns of things like traffic lights, but all that was done in good time. Surely some lawsuits were brought against companies who claimed products were Y2K-compliant, but nothing that broke any reputable companies we know of.

What would have happened had the alarm bell not been rung, had companies not shelled out the big bugs to update their systems? Perhaps it's because of the hype that it all went off so smoothly. Or perhaps it was all completely unnecessary?

Not only will we never know for sure, just five years hence, it would be tough to find someone who cares enough to find out.