Comment Re:The Y2K bug was REAL (Score 3, Informative) 179
I was working for Hollywood Video in the Tech Support department (support for the rental stores and all their computer equipment) leading up to and after Y2K, in Wilsonville, Oregon at the corporate office. (Of course this was before their two bankruptcies.) The software development department performed extensive (and probably expensive) testing on every facet of our current in-store software and hardware setup (custom COBOL software running on DOS 5.0 on NetWare 3.1 if you can believe it.) They were even going to scrap NetWare in favor of a brand spanking new Windows NT Remote Desktop-type setup, but we were highly disappointed when NetWare came up with a patch for NetWare 3.X series to make it Y2K compatible, so they scrapped the NT plans. But I digress...
Came in to work on 1/1/2000 a couple hours after midnight (yep they pretty much forced us to come in, and for very little extra pay - I may have been a bit drunk still.) Everything was already chaos: Almost every single store's NetWare server shut itself down at midnight, thinking there was a power outage. And since our stores' computers ran as dumb network-booted terminals to the main server, that means all the computers were down and rentals couldn't be performed except by writing the rentals on paper.
Problem was, in the test lab someone had commented out the UPS backup auto-shutdown software line in the servers' autoexec (or its NetWare equivalent, might have been autoexec.ncf or something.) And yes, I do know who that someone was (wasn't me.)
I think we got the last few stores up and working by 2 or 3 pm Pacific. And before you say "who rents movies on New Year's Day?" - EVERYONE did. New Year's Day and Christmas Day were two of our biggest movie rental days of the year. People are home with their families, the festivities are over, everyone wants something to do and streaming from the internet didn't really exist yet. What did everyone do? Rent a video or go to a theater. I'm not sure how many tens of thousands of dollars in rentals we lost that day, but I'm sure it was significant.
TL;DR: Just because you didn't hear about any significant losses due to Y2K bugs, doesn't mean they didn't happen. It's not like businesses were eager to admit they screwed up and forgot to test something.