O roteiro original do The Terminator deixa bem claro que a Skynet desenvolveu e construiu a tecnologia "Time displacement" por conta própria, usando os Terminators como sua força de trabalho:
REESE: ...it had no choice. The defensive grid was smashed. We'd taken the mainframes... We'd won. Taking out Connor then would make no difference. Skynet had to wipe out his entire existence. We captured the lab complex. Found the...whatever it was called...the time-displacement equipment. The Terminator had already gone through. They sent two of us to intercept, then zeroed the whole place. Sumner didn't make it.
Em seguida, o backup é feito pela publicação oficial do Terminator 2: Judgment Day , no qual nós (o leitor onisciente) aprendemos o raciocínio por trás da pesquisa da Skynet sobre tecnologia do tempo, para usar como arma:
Until one day the tide of battle turned, and Skynet, in a desperate burst of brilliance, devised time displacement, the first tactical time weapon. It sent a lethal emissary back through time to find and eliminate Sarah, so that John Connor might never be born.
Também pode ser interessante saber que, de acordo com a publicação oficial do Exterminador do Futuro: Ascensão das Máquinas , a base teórica para o TDE foi feita por Einstein e Hawking nos anos 50 e 80 (antes da Skynet se tornar ativa):
Claramente, a Skynet usou seu cérebro gigantesco para superar essa limitação.The super black project, funded by the Department of Defense, Central Intelligence Agency, National Reconnaissance Office, and National Security Agency, was designed to create an artificial wormhole. Einstein had first suggested such a phenomenon, and the English theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking had done some work on the possibility. But the problem was power. By most calculations the wattage needed to create an infinitesimally tiny wormhole, in other words a passageway through space-time, would take almost all the energy ever produced in the universe since the moment of the big bang.