The “embarrassing” coincidence surrounding IBM, HAL, and Stanley Kubrick’s ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’
It’s a well-known fact that one of the greatest, if not the greatest, science fiction films of all time is Stanley Kubrick’s 1969 masterpiece 2001: A Space Odyssey. Kubrick wrote the screenplay in collaboration with sci-fi writer Arthur C. Clarke with inspiration from Clarke’s 1951 short story The Sentinel.
The film charts humankind’s rise from pre-historic apes to spacefaring explorers but adds the notion that their intellectual and technological development is owed to a mysterious alien monolith. One of the most memorable parts of the film, though, is the malicious artificial intelligence HAL 9000.
HAL stands for Heuristically programmed Algorithmic computer. It’s the sentient AI computer that has helped to control the Discovery One spaceship on which astronauts David Bowman and Frank Poole head for Jupiter. Jupiter is the planet where a radio signal from the moon-landed monolith had been emitted.
While HAL is largely there to oversee the ship’s navigation systems, its ‘intentions’ change drastically during the voyage when it ‘decides’ to take complete control after suffering a malfunction. HAL turns off the life-support systems of Frank and Dave’s co-astronauts, and when he kills Frank, Dave is left with no choice but to access HAL’s hardware and shut him down once and for all.
An interesting facet surrounding HAL’s name is that the letters H, A and L are each just one letter removed from the computing giant IBM. Some fans of the film speculated that this was Kubrick taking a shot at IBM, although both Kubrick and Clarke have maintained that this was a mere coincidence.
Clarke wrote in The Lost Worlds of 2001, “About once a week some character spots the fact that HAL is one letter ahead of IBM, and promptly assumes that Stanley and I were taking a crack at the estimable institution… As it happened, IBM had given us a good deal of help, so we were quite embarrassed by this and would have changed the name had we spotted the coincidence.”
As Clarke professes, IBM was actually consulted during the film and their logo is embossed on a number of props in several scenes. We find the company’s name on Frank Poole’s spacesuit and even the cockpit panel of one of the spaceships. When it came to light that the film’s plot concerned a malfunctioning piece of computer hardware, IBM wanted to maintain that it was not related to their actual wares.
In fact, Kubrick wanted to clarify this with IBM, so he wrote them a letter that read: “Does IBM know that one of the main themes of the story is a psychotic computer? I don’t want to get anyone in trouble, and I don’t want them to feel they have been swindled. Please give me with exact status of things with IBM.”
