Skynet

On returning to Stanmore in 1967 he [the author] was in charge of the development of transportable satellite earth stations Types III and IV for use in the British Skynet defence communications system. He was responsible for the proposal and all the technical concepts for the communications payload of the Skynet II satellite.

But [William Robert] Graham confirmed that a proposal to carry the British Skynet satellites aboard the shuttle [Space Shuttle] had already been terminated.

The SKYNET 4D, 4E and 4F military communications satellites are built to the SKYNET 4 Stage 2 standard by Matra Marconi Space UK Ltd. […] The function of the SKYNET UHF antenna is to receive and transmit UHF communications covering the visible face of the Earth from geostationary orbit.

In the first two films, Skynet is a colossal piece of hardware, a single unit which contains an artificial intelligence designed to run the US nuclear weapons system, a doomsday computer that becomes aware and destroys humanity. […] It was only through some very fancy footwork that Terminator 2: Judgment Day managed to make it remotely plausible that Skynet had sent a second machine to a later date. Since Skynet is presumably aware of its own origins, this makes the first film marginally less plausible.

Maybe I watched too many Mazinger shows or read too many Yoko Tsuno BDs as a kid and, surely, I think the best way to end […] humanity would be to migrate SkyNet to Windows Vista, but somehow I thought it would be fun.

With the more convoluted Terminator Salvation, the seductive power of the skin job gives way to a constant maze of false seeming, centered on the relationship between John Connor and the part-cyborg Marcus Wright during the post-apocalyptic human fight against Skynet and its various killing machines.

Calpurnia, the Good Sister, the artificial intelligence created by Zephyr Bain, had achieved consciousness and self-awareness. She knew of her existence. She had crossed the line from the predictable and anticipated inevitable model of machine consciousness. However, it should have stopped there. The Skynet model from the Terminator movies didn't really work, because true consciousness was a by-product of chemistry and physical constitution.

We’re explicitly not building Skynet.