This time last year the world caught the Millennium Bug and hardly even sneezed. Let's refresh everyone's memory. "The Year2000 phenomenon . . . will be much more pervasive and serious than most of the [disasters] we've experienced in modern history."

That quote came courtesy of husband-and--wife team Ed and Jennifer Yourdon, who ran one of the better-known websites on the abbreviation that struck terror into many hearts in 1999: Y2K.

The Y2K computer glitch was a problem computer systems and many types of microchips had with understanding that the date had rolled over to the year 2000 last January 1st. Everything from aircraft flight systems to lifts and hospital monitors to toasters would think it was 1899 or no date at all. Many experts believed this could cause worldwide computer failure.

Obsessive computer users - those who regularly use little abbreviations on emails such as LOL (laughing out loud) and BTW (by the way) and, most hideously, ROTFL (rolling on the floor, laughing) - began to call the Y2K worst-case scenario TEOTWAWKI, or The End Of The World As We Know It.

Some of these people, especially those living in Montana, began stockpiling vast quantities of canned beans and bottled water in underground bunkers, a formidable combination for a sealed room in which one would wait with fellow believers until nuclear war and global economic meltdown had subsided enough to let in some fresh air.

So what happened? First, national governments and businesses spent billions rectifying the problems. In the US alone the bill was estimated at $100-$600 billion by the Insurance Information Institute. Programmers with long-lost computer skills, able to program in the computer languages in which the early, most vulnerable programs were written, came out of retirement and raked in the cash.

People shied away from flying, leaving airports empty and forlorn on New Year's Eve and New Year's Day. In some places, such as California, defence forces were on the alert near big cities such as Los Angeles, just in case. Even though, thanks to Hollywood films, the world believes LA is constantly at the centre of a towering inferno, the release of a hideous microbe, the arrival of evil aliens from space or attacks from escaped dinosaurs.

As the fatal hour approached, the bunker people closed the hatches and turned on the TV to watch the world go up in flames.

In the meantime, the rest of us went to parties, filled the streets, did the usual countdown and partied, waving our hands in the air like we just didn't care. Because most of us didn't, and we were right, because not a scary thing of any great import happened.

Instead of thrilling stories about exploding nuclear power plants, grounded aircraft, toaster mayhem and plummeting global stock markets (we had to wait until April for the plummeting markets), we got shocking headlines such as this (real) one: "MP3 Device Hit By Year 2000 Glitch".

A US spy satellite was knocked out for a few days, the Internet Explorer web browser had a little trouble and phone companies stumbled, but that was due to people calling each other at midnight, not from Y2K.

Were we all had in the biggest global con of all time? There is evidence this may be partly true: countries that spent little on the problem - Russia, China, small African nations - had few problems.

And lawyers are still making money from lawsuits filed by companies trying to claim back Y2K costs from their insurance companies. If lawyers are trying to make money from everything going well, rather than having the widely predicted field day with court cases resulting from Y2K disasters, one has proof positive that Y2K was, to a significant extent, a dud.

On the other hand, the potential computer problems were real, as evidenced by the few minor glitches that surfaced. If just one hospital had had deaths resulting from emergency support systems turning themselves off due to the bug, people would have panicked.

The massive work undertaken to prepare important systems globally certainly prevented any colossal disasters. The millennium was truly a miracle year in that no serious or life-threatening problems did emerge as a result of the glitch.

We probably will never know, then, if all those billions really needed to be spent.