Overreaction on Y2K Fixes

“U.S., Firms Overreacted to Y2K Fix, Critics Say,” said the Jan. 2 front-page headline. Unbelievable. If World War II ended today, the media and many of our fellow Americans would say the U.S. overreacted, fighting back so hard against the Axis.

Y2K was fraught with unknowns and was a potential calamity for this country, save for the effort expended on preventing same, with a cadre of lawyers waiting to help opportunists sue the daylights out of anyone who guessed wrong about it. Now companies will probably have to gird for lawsuits brought by those who allege they were coerced into spending money to “overprepare.”

This country is saddled with another plague, that of know-it-all hindsight, and unfortunately that didn’t come crashing down with the turn of the millennium, either.

IAN R. HEATH

Lake Forest

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We had no Y2K problems--yet--precisely because we spent the hundreds of billions. No doubt there was some additional upgrading that took place while the Y2K problem was being fixed, but that’s just using common sense; 20-plus-year-old computer systems just can’t cope with the modern economy, so it’s a good thing the Y2K bug scared tightfisted management into upgrading computer systems.

However, many or even most of the fixes weren’t permanent, so we’ll continue to have the fallout from Y2K for years to come. Don’t even think it’s all over.

ROBERT D. McCONNELL

Manhattan Beach

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The computer programmers are our “occult high priests.” We don’t understand what they do but we are afraid to cross them because they “keep the evil away.” We’ve been had. We’ve given them our wealth to keep the volcano from consuming us, only there was no volcano. The technology may change but human gullibility is eternal.

BILL SERANTONI

Thousand Oaks