Someone was bullshitting about the whole year 2000 problem (I'm enough of a geek to think that Y2K should be 2048 - which is of course wrong, it was us that changed the meaning of "kilo" not the y2k-botherers).
Actually they were 10 or 12 hours out - which in Europe at any rate had the effect that the highest density night wasn't the one predicted :-)
But this whole apocalyptic take on the thing is (almost certainly) wrong. (Of course that doesn't mean you shouldn't prepare for it... if you honestly thought that spending a few hundred dollars could save you from a 1% chance of death, you'd probably do it. If the 99% turns out to be true what have you got - a year's supply of baked beans & sardines in tomato sauce)
Computers will crash - or rather more seriously applications will produce bad results, this is much more an application problem than an OS problem - in fact things are already going wrong. But it won't happen all in one big bang on the 1st of January. Things will get slowly worse for the next year, the rate of problems will go up, more people will be knocking up quick-and-dirty work-arounds and fewer people working on new projects. North looks at it as a programming problem - but it's not, not when it actually hits, it then becomes an operations problem. And operators, system programmers & system administrators are used to working with computer systems that don't work. They do it every day. And the people who rely on computer systems are used to working when they go down. And if they aren't there are all those middle-aged middle-managers they laid off in the downsizing who can come back and show them how it used to be done.
There will be hassle and hard work and very possibly a depression. But there is very, very unlikely to be the kind of catastrophic failure that North seems to long for.
And even if it does fall out that way, he's wrong about cities as well. We know cities survive a hell of a beating, we saw it again and again in WW2. (Take a look at a picture of Hamburg in August 1943. They rebuilt that. Themselves, starting the day after) The complete physical destruction of the infrastructure of a city does not kill a city. A city is made of people not buildings. People with the skills that make cities work, and people who - just because they are in a city - need to get along to make cities work.
If all our big systems go down we will rebuild them. And what's more we'll rebuild them quickest in the big cities, because it's the big cities that have the concentration of people with the skills, and perhaps more importantly, the motivation to rebuild them.
Anyway, despite North, in the event of a complete collapse of business and government probably the worst place to be is the outer suburbs. You need fuel to get around (in the inner cities everything is close by). If there are refugees from cities they have to pass through the suburbs - and there is a lot more to steal there than there is on the open countryside & a lot fewer people to stop you than in the city centres.
Real rural life will continue of course, because people have the land and the skills to use it. And because they tend to have stores of supplies. I don't know if it would be a very prosperous rural life for most people in the "developed" parts of the world though. I wonder what the sudden withdrawal of pesticides, herbicides, fertiliser, & fuel to fly the crop-sprayer would do to yields on the average American industrial farm? If the year 2000 is half as bad as North says it will be there will be a massive change in the balance of economic power away from North America and towards the so-called Third World.
It looks like Gary North isn't really interested in the year 2000 problem. What he is interested in seems to be guns. He's latched on to this issue because it allows him to think and write more about guns. And, like so many other gunwankers he seems to get off fantasising about the total collapse of civil society because that way he gets to feel good about his guns. All this obsession with death and destruction is a bit strange in someone rumoured to be a Christian.
Of course where I am in London it's all academic. The nearest genuine open country is maybe 150 miles away, in a different nation, on the other side of the Channel. Most of what passes for countryside in the south of England is really exurbia, a sort of huge extended suburbia got up to look rural. Less than one percent of the population actually works on the land. We have more computer programmers than farmers. Most people in London have never even met a farmer. If it all falls over we will just have to put it back up again because there is no-where else to go.
Hey, maybe North is right about the USA. Maybe all the programmers will leave town to starve in the country. Maybe the systems will never get fixed. Maybe heavily armed gangs will take over the cities. Maybe you never will rebuild your civilization. I hope you will. But if it does turn out that you can't, we'll send you some foreign aid.