It's simply been obscured by the pleasures we get from our electronic tools and toys, and then lost in the zingy glow of techno-boosterism. It's almost a betrayal. Y2K has challenged a belief in digital technology that has been almost religious. But it's not surprising. The public has had little understanding of the context in which Y2K exists.
Bugs are an unintended source of inspiration.
I've fixed about 1,000 bugs in my life. In the case of the millennium bug, of course, the code was designed to use two-digit years, and that's precisely what it's doing. Two-digit dates were used originally to save space, since computer memory and disk storage were prohibitively expensive. By some estimates, the savings accrued by using two-digit years will have outweighed the entire cost of fixing the code for the year 2000. But Y2K did not even begin its existence as a design flaw.