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I have always heard that the name HAL was taken from stepping down one letter from the computer manufacturer IBM (I - H, B - A, M - L)

The in-story justification is that it stands for Heuristic Algorithm, which is kind of clunky and awkward, but then we're talking about computer nerds here, the same people who came up with names like SNOBOL to stand for "string-oriented symbolic language" (huh?), so it's possible.

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14y ago

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