In last year of the old millennium, governments and businesses warned us all of the dangers of the Y2K Bug. So did the hype help? Or was this bug never going to bite?

For those of us that remember it, Y2K is now looked back on as a bit of a laugh. It's a funny story about the world dealing with technology, but at the time, it was serious business. So how did it become such a memorable moment in history?

Image by Don Merton.

"Y2K was coming and you better be ready."

The internet arrived in New Zealand in 1989, but it was six years later that the World Wide Web's popularity caught on with the general public. Kiwi's finally had a connection to the rest of the world, but the web we knew then, wasn't anything like it is now.

"I don't even think Google was a search engine in those days."

Maurice Williamson was New Zealand's Communications and Information Technology Minister at the time. Unusually for an MP, he came from a coding background, and so had previously heard people in the computer industry talking about date-based operating systems and a possible problem at the end of 1999.

Back then the computers were large and their memory space was small, so programmers, trying to save space, had shortened the year format from four digits to two. This meant that instead of a date reading 1999 it would instead read as 99. When 1999 clocked over to the year 2000, computers would actually read it as 00.

With only 2 digits, 00 could potentially mean any date at all. This fault became known as the Y2K bug - 'Y' for year and '2K' for 2000. A 'bug' is an engineering term for a fault or flaw.

This flaw meant that computer dates might reset or even go back in time, and because of this, the systems running hospitals, power and other essential services could fail. The fear was that if we didn't fix this flaw, the world as we knew it might shut down.

Andrew McKie was working for Wellington Red Cross in 1999 and had heard the Y2K whispers.

"We had i386 computers back then so it was all pretty basic.

"We have a global Red Cross movement and I was talking to countries like Canada and the United Kingdom and they were really interested in what was happening in New Zealand, because we would be the first country affected."

Because of our proximity to the International Date Line, New Zealand would be the first developed country to see in the New Year - and by default be the early warning system for the rest of the world…

Go to this episode on rnz.co.nz for more details