IT started with fears being voiced about the potentially chaotic global impact of the millennium bug and ended with the Queen signally failing to get into the swing of things at the New Year’s Eve opening of the Millennium Dome.

In between, 1999 witnessed the opening of the Scottish Parliament, the launch of the euro, Bill Clinton being acquitted on impeachment charges by the US Senate, Nato warplanes bombing Kosovo, the Columbine High School massacre in Littleton, Colorado ... and, somewhere in the middle of it all, the inaugural edition, on February 7, of the Sunday Herald.

The millennium bug – the Y2K bug, for short – was a key concern that year. It led to predictions from experts that because computers would be stumped by the changeover in electronic dates from “99” to “00”, chaos would ensue. Planes would fall from the sky; nuclear power plants would implode; banks would collapse. There would be worldwide chaos.

Early in the year, Russia said it needed up to £500 million, six times its original estimate, to fight the bug threatening to destabilise the computers controlling its stockpile of nuclear weapons. It has even appealed to its old enemy, the US, for help in fixing the glitch.

Governments, industry and businesses spent huge sums and considerable effort on addressing the problem and making sure their computers were year 2000-compliant. Bill Clinton had even appointed a Y2K czar.

In the UK, the Government-backed Action 2000 placed eight-page pull-outs in newspapers, advising people what they could do about fax machines and answer phones.

In the event, Y2K came to nothing, apart from a few minor glitches. In September 2001, however, it was reported that the bug had led to more than 150 pregnant women being given incorrect results of a Down’s Syndrome test.

Even now, opinion is divided about the millennium bug. Some experts say it was a myth; others argue that it didn’t materialise only because so much work had gone into addressing it.

“We achieved our aim,” Gwynneth Flower, who was the managing director of Action 2000, told the BBC in December 2014. “There were a few eccentrics. One woman virtually moved her whole family to a remote house in Scotland, with water only from a well at the bottom of the garden, because she thought it would be Armageddon.”

Speaking of which, the advent of the new millennium itself was enough to stir up craziness. In January, police in a Jerusalem suburb seized 14 members of a Denver-based cult and said they had foiled a plot that the apocalyptic group had hoped would hasten the second coming of Christ. A report from our sister paper The Herald said: “Tens of thousands of peaceful Christian pilgrims are expected to travel to the Holy Land this year, but officials fear the millennium will also prove a magnet for deranged extremists seeking to live out apocalyptic fantasies.”

Thousands were expected to arrive in Jerusalem at the year’s end in the hope of salvation, destruction or the arrival of celestial beings.

One group in Indonesia was said to be hunting witches so as to prevent them from doing any millennial mischief. Another, in the American west, believes “Y2K is an omen that the Earth is nearing its end with destruction to come at the hands of aliens sent by God to punish humanity for ruining the environment”.

Next to destruction-by-alien, many on Earth took the reasonable view they would be getting off lightly if all that were to happen was nuclear power plants imploding as aeroplanes fell out of the sky.

Much attention was lavished on the first Scottish Parliament in nearly 300 years. Elections were held on

May 6, and the first meeting of the new parliament took place on May 12. On July 1, the Queen attended the official opening. Donald Dewar, the First Minister, said the day was a “turning point”, in which democracy had been renewed in Scotland. “This is about more than our politics and our laws. This is about who we are, how we carry ourselves and in quiet moments of today, we might hear echoes of the past.” Sheena Wellington sang A Man’s a Man for A’ That.

The first Bill passed by the new Parliament came on September 8 – the Mental Health (Public Safety and Appeals) (Scotland) Bill, introduced by what was then the Scottish Executive.

In 1999, Glasgow was the UK City Of Architecture And Design, an accolade that attracted much interest at home and abroad. In an article headed “New York of the North”, The Guardian’s Jonathan Glancey wrote: “Glasgow 1999 – an energetic organisation led by Deyan Sudjic and a team of world-class movers and shakers – has put together a programme of events and new buildings that will, hopefully, give Glasgow another much-needed shot in the arm.” The city was, he added, “united in a razzle-dazzle attempt to be the smartest, hippest, coolest, not just in Britain but in Europe”.

Scandal had hung over Bill Clinton for more than a year, ever since the Monica Lewinsky scandal had broken. In February, the US Senate, as expected, found him not guilty of two impeachment charges. A subdued Clinton offered a heartfelt apology to American people, and said it was time for the country to move on. One of the big overseas stories – and humanitarian crises – of the year was the worsening situation in Kosovo, where the bloody Serbian persecution of Kosovo Albanians led to Nato air strikes against targets in Kosovo and Serbia, beginning in 1999. Eleven weeks of Nato bombing compelled Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic to withdraw his troops and police.

Shakespeare In Love, directed by John Madden and co-written by Tom Stoppard, swept the Oscars, winning no fewer than seven awards, including Best Picture and, for Gwyneth Paltrow and Judi Dench respectively, Best Actress and Best Supporting Actress.

Scots group Travis made the big time with their album The Man Who, which gave rise to hit singles including Why Does It Always Rain on Me?.

Napster, a peer-to-peer file service that allowed music fans to share MP3 files with other users, was launched in June, to the consternation of the music industry. Memory Corporation, of Dalkeith, announced the launch of the first part of its MP3-GO system – SoulMate, a £90, palm-sized device that could download and play back up to an hour of music from the internet.

Even back in 1999, the sheer ubiquity of mobile telephones – one-quarter of the British population owned one – was a source of irritation to some older people.

Writing in The Herald, William Russell lamented: “Why every spotty teenager in the land has to have a mobile phone is another of life’s little mysteries, even if they are patently unlikely to suffer from brain damage through using them, there being clearly none to damage. But the way they fondle them, play with the keys, test whether there is a message, and do all the other arcane things it is possible to do with a mobile phone ... is very worrying.” He also lamented the phones’ habit of interrupting performances at the opera, the ballet, or in the concert hall.

On the way were auctions for licences to run the third generation of mobiles, which would provide high-speed access to a large number of entertainment and information services. Mobile phones were about to become even more popular.