The one that really stands out to me, though, is the Terminator series of movies. The main electronic protagonist of that movie was a computer system called Skynet. In actuality, Skynet was the original codename of the NORAD Computer System (NCS) which actually did air detection and correlation of radar data, since the Mountain was built in the 50s.
Okay, war story alert: I was stationed at NORAD from 1996 to 1999. We were in tha middle of a massive upgrade, removing the aforementioned aging NCS system and replacing it with the most wonderfully-acronymed system: CCPDS-R (Correlation Center Processing and Display Subsystem - Replacement).
The date came for the decommissioning of NCS (which, as was previously mentioned, was codenamed “Skynet”). Anyone want to venture a guess as to the date they chose to decommission NCS?
Yep, you guessed it: August 29, 1997. The very same day that Skynet was shut down in the Terminator movies, the same day that Skynet became self-aware.
I was there, in Core Processing inside Cheyenne Mountain, on August 29, 1997. We were all in the central administration area, where the main processors (each the size of a refrigerator) were all facing. We were playing the theme song to 2001: A Space Odyssey in the background. The generals were all there to do the honors. One by one, they powered off the main processors, and the disk packs behind them (a row of washing machine-sized disk drives) slowly started to spin down over the course of about a minute. The silence in that room, following that process, was deafening.
And every one of us Terminator geeks were literally holding our breaths, waiting for NCS to become self-aware and turn itself back on. Seriously, like half of us who were in that room were there because we really weren’t sure that when we turned it off, it would stay off. True story.
Moral of the story: NCS did not turn itself back on. And those disk packs, which had been running for decades, actually spun on ball bearings; once they spun down and sat there for about a minute or so, they would have completely seized up and would never have spun again. We had to relay that message throughout the crowd so they could literally rest assured that there was no way the system was going to come back to life. Also true story.