Naturally, much of that money would wind up in the bank accounts of consulting companies like Gartner. The Army has set up its own Y2K beachhead on the Web. Which all goes to show that it's much easier to spend money than to give some thought to a tough-sounding problem. For many older systems, Y2K is indeed critical. Without a date-conversion program or a manual revision of computer code, they'll spew out incorrect dates and mix up business records.
Programmers revise code all the time for all sorts of problems.
The world has yet to crash. Most of the PCs on our desktops will hardly be affected. A few keystrokes will reset their internal dates, a process not much more complicated than turning the hands on the kitchen clock for Daylight Savings Time. And computer manufacturers will likely post system upgrades to automate the task. If you're still worried, you can download free software from the National Software Testing Laboratories to see if your PC can handle the jump to the next century.