"Anti-climactic" is now a phrase with a new face . . . The New Year's Eve of the millennium.

Nothing happened. Planes did not fall out of the sky. Bombs did not explode. The Y2K bug never materialised and the United States, which spent an estimated $150 billion to $225 billion to prepare for the glitch while countries like Russia and China spent little, was livid.

"I think we've been had," declared Paul Strassmann, former chief information officer at the Pentagon, Xerox Corporation and General Foods.

"The United States has been ransomed. The psychology of Y2K funding was basically confronting management with extreme demands for which there was no rationale whatsoever."

In fact, most Americans were worried enough to stay home this New Year's Eve. The huge celebrations televised from Times Square in New York and Washington DC gave a somewhat skewed picture of what most people were doing.

In California, the celebrations were a dud. In downtown San Francisco, store owners in Union Square covered their windows with plywood, concerned about crowds getting out of hand. The Westin Street Francis Hotel cancelled plans for a giant lighted olive to plop into a seven-storey tall martini glass at midnight. It turned out that crowds were small anyway.

In Los Angeles, a light sprinkling of rain kept people home. The city has planned several parties, but by Thursday only half of the 400,000 free tickets had been claimed.

Instead, people stayed home in droves. Video stores reported brisk business. At peak hour, more than 1 million people were logged on simultaneously to America Online, the world's largest Internet service provider.

Maybe that is the theme of the new millennium here. Do not leave home. On New Year's Day, one man and one company announced that indeed was the idea. A 26-year-old former computer systems manager entered a rented house in Dallas, Texas, armed with a donated Gateway laptop computer, and announced he would not leave for a year in an effort to show that one could live entirely online.

The man, who has legally changed his name to DotComGuy, will order everything he needs online, chat with visitors online, and broadcast his experiment live to his company website, which has obtained several advertisers. "We certainly don't recommend that people lock themselves away from the world, but we will prove it can be done," said Len Critcher, a friend of DotComGuy and president of DotComGuy Inc.

Welcome to the future?