As things stand 24 hours after the turn of the century, the Y2K bug appears to have been contained. The precautions, which some estimates say cost US$400 billion (HK$3,112 billion), seem to have worked.

Instead of aircraft falling out of the sky and nuclear missiles firing themselves, the limelight was seized by Boris Yeltsin for those who were not so busy celebrating that they found time for the news on Friday night.

Of course it is too early to cry victory. There could be nasty surprises in store when markets re-open and companies start to use applications and complex software.

But, provided that nothing major goes wrong in the coming days, the international effort to cope with the threat will stand as an impressive example of how a worldwide effort can be made to work to a common end for the good of all.

The United States played a considerable role in this by its insistence on Y2K compliance by governments, organisations and companies with which it deals.

But the overwhelming argument for general action was so strong that no country was going to come out and say that it did not think it needed to take steps. Just as no airline was going to say it would go on flying without having done all it could to ward off bug attacks, and no bank was going to be found not taking steps to protect its clients' money.

Inevitably, there is now an argument that too much was spent, that it was all a bonanza for consultants who found it in their interests to exaggerate the dangers. On Friday, the top US Y2K official found it necessary to defend the spending.

More interesting was his reference to the Y2K issue as 'the biggest management challenge the world has had in 50 years'.

Back in the early 1990s, when communism fell in the Soviet Union and the Gulf war alliance marshalled overwhelming force against Saddam Hussein, it seemed possible to envisage the world being benignly managed towards a new order.

That vision died a death somewhere between Rwanda and Kosovo, and is going to be relegated even further into the background as the debate about globalisation gains strength after the World Trade Organisation breakdown in Seattle.

But now we have been given a good example of how co-operation can work, both within countries and among them - and with companies seeing the need to join in.

Of course, we will never know just how grave the threat was - just as we cannot calculate which is greater: the expense of the anti-bug campaign or the cost that would have been involved in writing four digits into software in the days when random-access memory was a million times as expensive as it is today.

But the perceived danger was so universal that it provoked a unique kind of response. Not only was it worldwide, but its potential affected people directly in their everyday lives - in their ability to get money from cash dispensers or to make a telephone call or to ride the lift up to their flats.

As never before, people in developed countries were made forcibly aware of how much of their lives depends on computer systems which few understand and only an infinitesimal minority could fix if they went wrong.

If computers have come to form a key base of 21st century life, the threat from the bug was akin to the plagues of history, with the added twist of coinciding with the millennium.

What a pity that we cannot be stirred to similar action to stamp out other afflictions in the form of war, hunger and oppression.

But the great thing about the new computer world is that it transcends boundaries. Unfortunately for the people who suffer from them, those other, older bugs belong in the other, older world that is not going to be swept away merely by the threat of Y2K.