Think back to December 31 1999. Where were you when the countdown to the New Year ended?

One thing I can be certain of is that you weren’t stuck in a lift hurtling 12 storeys to the ground, in the midst of a massive traffic pile-up because all the lights stopped working at once or in a plane plummeting 30,000 feet from the sky as all the onboard systems died.

Yet, if the scaremongers in the IT world were to be believed, you should have been. Fears over the effects of the millennium bug had been blasted all over the IT press and even in the mainstream media for months (years in some cases) beforehand.

Millions of pounds were wasted in a desperate bid to upgrade systems before the end of the century. In the end, absolutely nothing happened. The world didn’t end with a bang or …