It is now well known that Y2K was the biggest and probably the costliest hoax ever. Whose brain child was it?

Y2K played on the fears of people. Yet not a single computer went haywire. It is supposed to have costed the world approx. $ 2billion. To India - it meant lot of jobs in the software sector - it was the basis for Indian software development's rise?

Who created such a hoax - why did the world never found out?

Actually, the "Y2K" bug was not really a hoax. Probably the biggest misconception was that everything was going to melt down, cause mass chaos, end of world conditions, etc.

Because a lot of older computer software (especially code written for the banking industry) used and stored two digits to store the year, the behavior of the software when the two digits wrapped back to '00' in the year 2000.

It was assumed that most of this developed software would have ended its lifecycle by that time, but since it continued to work well, it was never really "replaced". Most of the developers that had written this software were probably: a) neither still working with it; b) no longer around; or c) did not remember everything the software would do to say for certain whether or not it would cause problems.

For certain industries, such as the banking industry which posts interests earnings as well as keeps track of amortizations, it was 'unknown' as to what the changes in the two digit year would do. If anything though, it could have probably caused an administrative nightmare which could have cost more in correcting any problems the software would cause in addition to fixing it.

The reason why the Y2K bug had very little impact on the industry is because many companies were vigilant in testing their software for the date change, documenting the problems and in some cases, immediately upgrading the source code to handle four digit dates. Because most of this had been put into place before the year 2000, it went rather smoothly.

A software company that I had worked (which developed communications software) did find that our software was affected in several places, with only a couple of severe problems that would have facilitated changes to the code regardless. We documented the breaking changes and had corrected our latest source code along with issuing patches for older products.

We managed to complete repairing the short list of defects well before the year 2000, so the impact was small. I speculate the reason why there was so little impact overall was due to the most severe and costly problems had already been made and deployed.

Had nothing been done about it, I'm sure the cost in administrative problems (mainly in the banking, accounting, payroll, tax, billing, rental, etc. industries) could have ended up still requiring source code modifications (probably at a higher premium due to the demand for programmers) as well as the costs in correcting administrative/monetary problems caused by the "bug".

Agree with above, it was not a hoax - if it had not been such a big deal in the news, then I personally believe that the horror stories that had been suggested as possible outcomes would have happened.

To call something a hoax just because it did not happen is an error. There were a number of really deadly bugs that were discovered before the rollover that would have cost very many lives had the hype not been present.