HAL’s demise
HAL’s chilling shutdown scene - in which the computer sings Daisy Bell - was inspired by Clarke’s visit to Bell Labs in the early 1960s.
There, he watched an IBM 704 computer sing the same tune, the first ever computer-synthesised song.
This cemented the idea that HAL might be an indirect play on “IBM,” since each letter is alphabetically adjacent.
Clarke dismissed the theory, maintaining HAL simply stood for “Heuristically programmed ALgorithmic computer,” but the eerie coincidence remains one of cinema’s great fan debates.