h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

As stated both here, and in the "predicting the future" article is that the computer industry failed to predict that the century would end.
Nice though it is to knock the nerds, the truth is that Y2K was a failure of management, not of software development....you see way back in the mists of time (alright, the 70s and 80s ) computer storage was very expensive so the developers said to the managers "we can save some of the cost of this very expensive storage by using a two digit year, but the programs will need to be changed beofre the date changes over". Unfortunately, managers being managers they only heard what they wanted to i.e. "we can save some money" and so the programs where written with 2 digit years and the money was saved...and then when the programs were not Y2K compliant the managers did whinge and moan and cause unneccessary stress by pretending the problem had "arisen" or "caught them unawares".
Anyhow - just thought I'd get that off my chest.

Though managers are usually wrong, it's not their fault that the programmers forgot that 2000 AD is a leap year (must have been their way of making up for forgetting that 1900 was NOT a leap year).