It’s been a while but many of us still remember the problems, hype, and really bad movie centered around the Y2K bug. For you kids, that was a problem caused by the common practice of storing the year of dates as YY instead of YYYY. It saved a couple bytes (or characters) per date and not that long ago storage was hideously expensive so it seemed like a good tradeoff. Until the year 2000 loomed bringing the threat of financial system shutdown due to failing software.
In the end, it turned out to be pretty much a nonevent due, in part, to heroic efforts to get all that software fixed before the new millennium. Everyone gave a huge sigh of relief and software engineers promised themselves that they’d never make that mistake again. Except.
To be fair, this problem was a little less predictable than Y2K but notice that once again there was a lack of concern until disaster was imminent. Maybe we didn’t learn the Y2K lesson as well as we thought.