The Terminator films paint a bleak future of post-apocalyptic struggle to cling to life. With Robots able to think for themselves, they have decided that the best course of action is to predictably destroy the human race. Back in 1984, when the first film was released, and much like other films of that decade, there was a genuine feeling that robotics and computer technology would advance at such a rate that it was only a matter of time before we reached the point where we could create a rampant band of bloodthirsty cyborgs. Thankfully for us, the majority of fragging happens in the virtual world over an Internet connection, leaving us free to turn off the computer and go and play in the sun. But how far off were the creators of the Terminator films from actual technology available on those dates? Here we take a look at where Terminator completely missed the mark:
4th August 1997
This is the fateful day that Skynet goes live in the future described in Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991). Yikes. It isn’t Judgment Day itself, though. The T-800 says Skynet becomes self-aware at 2:14 a.m. Eastern time on 29th August 1997. When humans try to shut it down, it launches nuclear missiles at Russia to provoke a strike against the United States. The films give humanity less than a month between switching on the system and wishing someone had left it unplugged.
What was happening in 1997?
In 1997, Microsoft ruled the roost in PC software. It released Internet Explorer 4 later that year. Thanks, Microsoft. There was a much better example of machines beating humans that May, when IBM’s Deep Blue defeated world chess champion Garry Kasparov in a six-game match. It could assess huge numbers of chess positions, but its job was still to play chess. Winning on a board didn’t give it the skills to run a war. Real robots had their own success that summer: NASA’s Sojourner reached Mars aboard Pathfinder on 4th July. A rover studying rocks on another planet was quite an achievement. It also gives you a fairer picture of robotics in 1997 than a browser update does.
25th July 2004
Judgment Day is rescheduled to 2004, a date which features in Terminator 3 after the original plan is scuppered in Terminator 2 when the Cyberdyne Systems research facility is destroyed. It was a shame; it was a nice-looking office. In Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines (2003), the military takes over the project. Skynet spreads through computer networks, leaving John Connor without a single central computer he can destroy. The sequel turns the apparent victory over Cyberdyne into a delay.
What was happening in 2004?
A computer worm called MyDoom was terrorizing everyone on the net after it emerged in January 2004. It spread through infected email attachments and could leave a back door into a victim’s machine. The millennium bug, meanwhile, had been a real software problem. Years of repairs and testing helped keep the change to 2000 from causing the feared widespread failures. MyDoom wasn’t proof that computers had grown a mind of their own. It was malicious software doing what its authors had designed it to do.
Another attack on the information superhighway was the spread of phishing. By creating a web page or an email that looks like a real document or webpage from another source, phishing is the act of trying to make you hand sensitive information to a fraudster. A copied bank page can look quite convincing, right up to the point where your login goes to someone who has no business seeing it.
Credit card details and bank account passwords were among the targets, with a lot of casual net users falling for the sophisticated scams. Phishing remains a threat today, although you can bet criminal gangs are the ones behind the schemes and not the computers themselves. Away from the inbox, autonomous machines still had some basic hurdles to clear. At DARPA’s first Grand Challenge in March 2004, none of the competing driverless vehicles finished the desert course. Even the best entry managed only about 7.5 miles.
21st April 2011
Skynet launches attacks with missiles in the television series The Sarah Connor Chronicles. Derek Reese names 21st April 2011 as his Judgment Day in the episode Ourselves Alone. His wording matters: people arriving from different futures may not share the same history. The show’s dates belong to its own version of events, so they shouldn’t be treated as the next step in one unbroken film timeline.
In 2011, we didn’t get annihilated by nuclear missiles, but we did have to put up with a Facebook timeline and the underwhelming updates featured on the iPhone 4S. Both arrived later in the year: Facebook introduced Timeline in September, and the iPhone 4S went on sale on 14th October. Its Siri assistant let you do things such as set reminders by speaking to the phone. Earlier that year, IBM’s Watson beat Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter on Jeopardy! The contest aired in February, and Watson answered clues using stored information without an internet connection. Computers could now put on quite a show with language as well as chess. That still leaves a lot of work between winning a quiz and becoming Skynet.
So, as it turns out, Judgement Day was a little further off than people expected.
2018
The last title to be released in the series before the 2015 reboot was Terminator Salvation (2009), which was set in 2018. That year is the setting for the war after Judgment Day, rather than another date for the first nuclear attack. The film was followed by Terminator Genisys (2015) and Terminator: Dark Fate (2019), which took the story into other versions of the future.
The film shows a new type of cyborg, Marcus Wright, who combines human tissue with a mechanical body and initially believes he is human. The flesh disguise itself wasn’t new to the series. The Terminator in the 1984 film already had living tissue over a metal skeleton. Marcus makes the idea more troubling by giving the person inside the machine a shock of his own when he learns what has happened to him.
By the real 2018, Boston Dynamics was showing its Atlas robot jumping over a log and up a series of steps. Its October parkour video is a much better comparison with the films’ walking machines than a claim about 3D printing alone. Later work even brought living tissue into the picture. In 2022, University of Tokyo researchers covered a robotic finger with living skin grown from human cells. They repaired a cut with a collagen patch while the finger was kept in a liquid medium. In 2024, a team at the university reported a way to attach living skin to a robotic face that could smile. These were lab demonstrations of particular parts, each with a limited job.
Keeping living skin healthy on a robot is still a job in itself. In that finger experiment, repairing a cut needed a patch and a liquid bath. It’s hard to make an entrance like the Terminator when part of you is still soaking in the lab.