“Three billion human lives ended on August 29th, 1997.
The survivors of the nuclear fire called the war Judgment Day.
They lived only to face a new nightmare: the war against the machines.
The computer which controlled the machines, Skynet, sent two Terminators back through time.
Their mission: to destroy the leader of the human resistance, John Connor, my son.
The first Terminator was programmed to strike at me in the year 1984, before John was born.
It failed. The second was set to strike at John himself when he was still a child.
As before, the resistance was able to send a lone warrior, a protector for John. It was just a question of which one of them would reach him first.”
“Terminator 2: Judgement Day” (1991)
On this date in 1997, the world ended.
Don’t worry, not THIS world.
In “The Terminator” franchise, Skynet was a computer system developed for the U.S. military by the defense company Cyberdyne Systems; its technology was designed by Miles Bennett Dyson and his team.
Skynet was originally built as a “Global Information Grid/Digital Defense Network” and was later given command over all computerized military hardware and systems, including the B-2 stealth bomber fleet and America’s entire nuclear weapons arsenal.
The strategy behind Skynet’s creation was to remove the possibility of human error and slow reaction time to guarantee a fast, efficient response to enemy attack.
Skynet was originally activated by the military to control the nuclear arsenal on August 4, 1997 and it began to learn at a geometric rate. At 2:14 a.m., EDT, on August 29 of that year, it gained artificial consciousness, and the panicking operators, realizing the full extent of its capabilities, tried to deactivate it.
Skynet perceived this as an attack. Skynet came to the logical conclusion that all of humanity would attempt to destroy it.
In order to continue fulfilling its programming mandates of “safeguarding the world” and to defend itself against humanity, Skynet launched nuclear missiles under its command at Russia, which responded with a nuclear counter-attack against the U.S. and its allies.
Consequent to the nuclear exchange, over three billion people were killed in an event that came to be known as “Judgment Day.” (Wikipedia)
Happy Judgement Day, I guess 