Most people think the Y2K scare was a scam because they were sort of forced into buying new, “Y2K ready” computers when computers themselves didn't need fixing.

I personally owned a Unysys 486 from 1991 that worked fine many years after 2000, and I bet my MSX2 would have worked fine, too.

If anything, it was a software problem, but computer and software manufacturers made it everybody's problem. That was the scam and the disinfo.

Should software engineers be treated as heroes because they had to solve a problem that they created themselves? That's the real question.