I don't understand what the big deal was about Y2K. Why would the world stop just because the computers would...I mean we existed all of these years without computers. It would make life more difficult certainly, but it wouldn't entirely end life as we know it.

Answer 1

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=y2k+concerns+fears

Computers were pretty much set to have the year as 19?? and many people didn't trust the the shift from 1999 to 2000 would go smoothly. Huge amounts of money are transfered by means of computers, and if the computers stopped working because they couldn't read the dates correctly, no one knew what would happen.

It was more the fear of the unknown than anything else.

Answer 2

So much of our world depended upon computers in 2000 that if they had failed, businesses would have lost millions (billions?) of dollars retrieving lost data.