THE END OF THE WORLD?
Panic and fear.
Cries of aproaching doomsday.
Was it all justified?
To make a long story short, kind of.
While the world kept turning on January 1st, 2000, the y2k bug did manage to cause some problems. They ranged from wacky and silly to genuinely burdensome, but each one gives us a little glimpse into the true possibilites of y2k. For example, one New York resident found himself suddenly owing north of $90,000 to his local video store for a movie that was, apparently, a century overdue. This incident is amusing, sure, but if every rental service had had this issue, it would have been a massive headache for all involved.
A slightly more serious incident was that of two different Japanese nuclear power plants' failing alarm systems. While the failure was just in the alarm systems themselves, nothing major actually occured involving the nuclear cores of the plants, failed alarms are concerning in and of themselves. What if there had been a problem? What if an alarm system at another location, say a bank or government building, had gone down and someone was able to take advantage of that?
In essence, y2k was nothing to be worried about, but the implications of what could have gone wrong are nothing to scoff at either.