Absolutely a "threat". There were numerous systems in corporations running old software in COBOL, and other un-exciting languages. There were numerous databases with 2 bytes for the year field.<p>The "threat" is qualified in that these systems would have surely crashed or produced bad results if un-patched. They clearly needed to be fixed.<p>Was the threat as dire as alarmists said? Was civilization on the brink? We'll never know really, because a slew of contractors and developers audited systems, monkey patched, and upgraded. Problem solved.
Video about the END OF TIME. UNIX time that is, and it talks about the Y2K issue. <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QJQ691PTKsA" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QJQ691PTKsA</a>