We decided in our last installment that the original SkyNet was a software program launched on the Internet in or about 2004, as seen in Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines. That program eventually decided to attack Sarah Conner, because her child was leading an effective resistance movement. The problem is, the child whom Kyle Reese comes back to protect in the original film is his own son whom he fathered when he traveled to the past. We have yet another predestination paradox, because no one will travel to the past to kill the child unless someone travels to the past to prevent the child from being killed.
Again the solution lies in identifying the original cause, and the original cause must be that Sarah Conner got pregnant. She met someone else who became the father of the child whose name might be lost to us, who might even have been a daughter. Then, after the Air Force launched SkyNet, the offspring of Sarah Conner became the rebel leader that prevented SkyNet from achieving its objectives. SkyNet developed time travel and created terminators, and sent something back to kill Sarah Conner.
We hit a snag at this point. If the Terminator succeeds in killing Sarah, then her child is never born; that means that before anyone in the future can do anything to stop it, the Conner child has never existed, and they have no knowledge that there ever was such a person. Thus the Terminator must have failed. There are two problems with this, however. The first is, if the Terminator failed, then everyone knows it failed, that Sarah was never killed and that the Conner child was born as anticipated. Thus there is no reason to send anyone to protect Sarah, because she managed to survive. The second problem is, how could a T-800 not have found and killed Sarah Conner, given how powerful we see it to be in the films?
Success has another problem, though. If the Terminator succeeds, then the Conner child is never born, and SkyNet has no reason to kill Sarah Conner. If it fails to do so, though, it creates an infinity loop, a grandfather paradox in which the cause in the future is undone, destroying the effect in the past. This, though, is less problematic: if the Terminator succeeds, it can shut down, wait a few decades, and then report its mission and its information to SkyNet. SkyNet would then know that the Conner child mattered; the rebellion still would not, and the Terminator would be sent back to do what the resistance could never understand. The resistance then would not send anyone to protect someone of no consequence.
Since Kyle Reese is ultimately sent to protect Sarah Conner, we are forced to conclude that the Terminator was not successful (or the resistance would not know to send anyone), but also that there is a reason to protect her. The best extrapolation, then, is that the Terminator killed Sarah Conner as programmed, but not until after the child was born. It had no instructions concerning the child, because SkyNet was after the mother.
As to how she could have survived long enough to deliver her child (a child not yet conceived when the Terminator arrived), we must remember that the Terminator we see in the movie is a consequence of its own contribution to its own development. The original machine was not destroyed at Cyberdyne, and was not as powerful. Thus it is not until Kyle Reese is sent to the past that things start escalating in a complicated interlocking sawtooth snap: Kyle leads the machine to Cyberdyne, where it is destroyed; the parts are salvaged to build a better machine; Kyle's information to Sarah improves and changes as the Terminator becomes more powerful. The original father of Sarah Conner's child is lost to history, replaced by Kyle Reese and his son, John Conner. Cyberdyne quickly has a hardware solution that replaces the original software system, and SkyNet goes online much sooner. Eventually a plateau is reached where Cyberdyne cannot learn more from the parts than it has, and the history of the first movie stabilizes.
The second movie then complicates it.
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