My neighbour explains that the crumbs he puts round his house each week keep away the tigers. When challenged with the inescapable fact that there are no tigers in Sydney, he replies: "Precisely!".

Tigers certainly exist and would wreak havoc in suburban Australia, but suppose every Australian had to contribute $700 for the crumbs to be spread about the place, with little say in the matter. Then perhaps we would question the sanity of my neighbour more closely.

An analysis of the Y2K phenomenon leads to the conclusion that computer systems are very complex and that no one is willing to say that any computer program will operate in a particular way given a particular set of inputs.

The fact that something might have happened as dates rolled over from 31/12/1999 to 01/01/2000 caused honest people to say that they simply could not guarantee that any computer would not function aberrantly, and somewhat less scrupulous folk to offer to fix the system for large amounts of cash.

Given the 300 million personal computers in the world (turn in your grave the founder of IBM, who suggested the world would need about five or six) each of which might, say, malfunction once a year, nearly 1 million computers should have suffered a glitch on January 1, 2000. Not because of the Y2K bug, but for the same reasons that another 1 million computers hiccuped on December 31, 1999, and yet another 1 million will fall over today.

I believe that the concern of being sued, rather than aeroplanes falling from the skies or nuclear power plants exploding, was the real driver of the Y2K movement, which in its latter days took over as the millennial cult for 2000. No Second Coming of Christ or advent of aliens for this modern age, but our own Y2K millennium computer bug.

Analysed in these terms, we see that Y2K has many of the attributes of the evil forces conjured by wacky sects.

The supposed effects are real – computers can fail just as volcanoes can erupt, spewing death and destruction in their path.

The trigger for such effects is defined (the Second Coming), but the actual mechanism for bad things happening is not so obvious (the wrath of God).

Only a small number of priest-like folk who have been given a sign (a two-day computer course for some) can prevent the destruction, and they are willing to do it for a lot of money.

In biblical terms we have got off quite lightly -- $12 billion is only one-quarter of an Australian gross domestic product tithe. Just as with real millennial motifs, the populace has taken the basic idea and, aided and abetted by the communications of the day (the media), allowed the beast to grow and become the terrible scourge that has caused the stockpiling of toilet rolls and baked beans on a hitherto unprecedented scale.

We can see why a number of systems did not fail. No recipient of a heart pacemaker was turned off on 01/01/00. Why? Because there is no date data of any sort in the electronics of these devices. (In fact, this was a joke made by a worthy of the Australian Computer Society two years ago -- which returned to haunt him in the latter days of 1999.)

Network hubs are not Y2K compliant because they, too, have no datey bits.

Even systems that do deal in time often could be trivially fixed. Credit cards, with lifetimes of five years, can operate quite happily with two digit expiry years, and systems in which the pattern of days, not the actual year, is important (video recorders, traffic lights) can also easily be made Y2K compliant.

Even the dreaded COBOL computer language has been able to accept four-digit years since 1963.

While computer programs are very complicated, there are ways of writing them so that the structure allows the tracking of data such as dates and times.

The Y2K problem was, in my opinion, that the snake-oil salesmen managed to take over a minor but potentially annoying problem and run off with it. The real Y2K disaster was that they would cause more chaos than they averted.

Unfortunately for them and their propaganda, there was no small nuclear meltdown in a former Soviet republic, nor did planes in some Third World country drop from the skies (more than usual). The 1 million computers that were going to fail will have done so and the earth continues its merry way round the sun.

In the end, for computer applications, as for any product facing a known situation (01/01/00), the continued working of the program is a problem for the maker of that program and not me, and no amount of disclaimers and fine print would prevent a bad programmer from reaping his legal rewards should his product fail as a result of negligence. My neighbour has given up the crumbs and is laying a trail of $5 notes. These apparently keep the elephants away too. He has offered me to join his enterprise. As he says: "You can never be too careful when your life is at stake."