Ten years ago, many biomedical technology professionals were obsessed by Y2K fears. Supposedly, every machine in the entire world that had a date in it was subject to failure when the millennium changed. Computer programmers had adopted a practice from pre-computer days of representing the year with just two digits. They failed to look forward to 11:59:59 PM on Dec. 31, 1999 when the last two digits would roll over to “00.” How would computers in these machines react? Would they think it was 1900? What would that do to any date-related computations in computerized devices? Would patient-care machines stop working? Or even worse, would they process the date incorrectly and begin delivering incorrect dosages or treatments to patients, resulting in injury or even death?Mitigating the effects of Y2K came in various forms. Letters and Internet postings by manufacturers were designed to assure you of the problems (or lack thereof) with the manufacturer's equipment. ECRI Institute started a special Y2K website. The easiest way to test equipment was to run the date in the machine forward to Dec. 31, 1999 and let the machine run normally until the date changed to Jan. 1, 2000. By observing its operation carefully, it was possible to troubleshoot a device. When it checked out, the date was set back to the correct date and the next item was checked.Thank goodness there were few networked devices that presented a particular problem. If a date was sent from one device to another, the receiving device might misinterpret it and make a mistake.Hospitals spent enormous amounts of money updating equipment and hiring technical experts to scour their inventories for suspect equipment. Many people made lots of money through Y2K consulting.Troy Gillette from New Jersey summed up the culmination of his hospital's Y2K preparations on Biomedtalk on Dec. 28, 1999:On Dec. 31, as the New Year was ushered in starting in Australia at 8 a.m. EST, everyone watched Biomedtalk for reports from the other side of the world. By the time the United Kingdom changed at 7 p.m. EST, we were pretty sure that not much was going to happen in the United States. Still, we could not be sure.At my 500-bed hospital, several staffers, including myself, were at the hospital as the hour approached midnight. The hospital set up a command center in the radiology conference room. Representatives from administration, engineering, nursing, security, joined together in a festive, but tense, atmosphere.In the biomed department, because we could not depend upon the elevators and anticipating a worst-case scenario, we posted a couple of biomedical equipment technicians on the eight-story hospital's top floor with defibrillators and other emergency devices. Our thought was that they could run downstairs to an affected department easier than they could run upstairs if the elevators failed.As it turned out, nothing happened. I've always wondered if this anticlimax was because we prepared so well or because the threat was never there. I want to believe the former. If the measure of success was measured by nothing happening, then we were supremely successful. Dean Skillcorn said it best in his post to Biomedtalk after reading posts from Taiwan about the few problems observed: