Kyle Reese indicou que o T-800 era o estado da arte no design do Terminator:
The six hundred series had rubber skin. We nailed them easy. But the
eight hundreds are new. They look human. Sweat, bad breath,
everything. Touch it, you’d feel warmth. But by then you’d already be
dead. Very hard to spot.
Terminator: Frakes Novelisation
Ele estava claro errado. Depois de enviar seu modelo de produção top de linha (e perceber que não havia funcionado), a Skynet também enviou algo que tinha no laboratório:
"Not like me. A T-1000. Advanced prototype, A mimetic polyalloy."
Terminator 2: Judgement Day - Frakes novelisation
Note que James Cameron sentiu que enviar o T-1000 era um ato de extremo desespero da Skynet, já que o "modo de aprendizado" do Terminator poderia facilmente se voltar contra ele:
"I started thinking about the film in two stages. In the first stage
the future sends back a mechanical guy, essentially what The
Terminator became, and the good guys send back their warrior. In the
end, the mechanical guy is destroyed. But up there in the future,
somewhere, they say, well, wait a minute, that didn't work; what else
do we have? And the answer is something terrible, something even
they're afraid of. Something they've created that they keep locked up,
hidden away in a box, something they're terrified to unleash because
even they don't know what the consequences will be - they being the
machines, now in charge of the future.
JamesCameronOnline - Terminator FAQ