At Peterson Air Force Base, U.S. and Russian military experts marked the new year_s arrival in Moscow and Washington without incident.

The United States, which pushed the world to spend billions to meet the 2000 technology challenge, said today it was pleasantly surprised by the scarcity of reported computer glitches but confident the threat had been real. Dire predictions for some developing countries were cast aside when nation after nation rolled into 2000 without long-feared, date-related disruptions in vitals sectors such as electricity, telecommunications and aviation. Rear Adm. Bob Willard of the U.S. military Joint Chiefs of Staff told reporters the Pentagon was watching closely for attempts to break into defense computer systems but was having no more such problems than usual. The Pentagon-funded CERT Coordination Center, a computer emergency response team at Carnegie-Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pa., said the night had been uneventful. In the United States, eight power plants encountered a date-related computer glitch after passing midnight Greenwich Mean Time (GMT), but service was not disrupted and the problem was fixed quickly, Koskinen said. The United States will have spent $100 billion to combat the Y2K bug, including about $8.6 billion by the federal government. Another $100 billion will have been spent overseas, according to Koskinen, head of the President_s Council on Millennium Conversion. As soon as Japan and its neighbors reported all systems up and running after midnight in their time zones, Koskinen defended the vast sums spent for fear of the potential Jan. 1 pitfall. He called fixing Y2K the greatest management challenge in 50 years. ``I think that we should not underestimate the nature of the problem that was originally there,'' he said. IBM, the world_s largest computer maker, said its systems were operating normally. It said its customers had reported no problems. An estimated 70 percent of the world's business data resides on mainframe computers, most of them IBM machines. Intel, the leading chipmaker with large operations in Asia, Europe and elsewhere, said it had encountered "no significant issues" at any of its plants. A spokesman for bank-insurance giant Citigroup said early Saturday: "It_s business as usual." He said no malfunctions had been reported. According to government filings and company statements, Citigroup was expected to spend $950 million on Y2K, more than any other U.S. company. Of continuing concern were possible hidden Y2K glitches that could foul up management systems and gradually erode performance as businesses reopen next week, officials said. Koskinen spoke at a $50 million command center set up by the White House to gather Y2K updates from industry, state, local and foreign governments.