Skynet was due in 1997. Here is what 1997 got instead

In Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991), the Terminator explains that Skynet goes online on 4 August 1997 and becomes self-aware at 2:14 a.m. on 29 August. Hours later, the missiles fly. The real 1997 was busy too, just less apocalyptic.

The real 1997

• 3 to 11 May: IBM's Deep Blue beats world champion Garry Kasparov 3½–2½ in a six-game rematch in New York. It is the first time a computer beats a reigning champion in a match under standard tournament time controls. Kasparov had won their first match, in 1996, 4–2.
• June: Dragon Systems releases Dragon NaturallySpeaking, one of the first general-purpose programs for home PCs that let you dictate continuously instead of pausing between words.
• 4 July: NASA's Mars Pathfinder lands, carrying Sojourner, the first rover on Mars. The 11.5 kg rover was planned for a week and kept working for 83 days.
• 29 August: Nothing happens.

What Deep Blue really was

Deep Blue was a cluster of 30 IBM RS/6000 SP nodes with 480 custom chess chips, checking about 200 million positions a second. On the June 1997 list of the world's 500 fastest supercomputers, it ranked 259th. Kasparov alleged human help during the games; IBM denied it, declined a rematch and retired the machine.

It could do one thing extraordinarily well, and nothing else. Judgment Day, in the end, was a board game.