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From: linden@positive.eng.sun.com (Peter van der Linden)
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.urban,alt.folklore.computers
Subject: People will be fired for buying IBM
Date: 13 Jan 1994 05:46:25 GMT

I've seen a few recent claims on AFU that something must be true because the author/designer/writer said so. E.g. "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds" isn't about LSD because John Lennon says so. "Babe Ruth candy wasn't named after Babe Ruth the baseball player because the candy company says so. The missing biscuits actually happened to Douglas Adams because he says so.

I'd like to energetically refute this rather pathetic belief in the veracity of human nature. Certainly the claims of an author are one piece of evidence, but there is no particular reason why they should be accepted as gospel truth; consider them rather in the context of all pieces of evidence. This is what happens in courts of law every day.

I'm reminded of this by recently discovering a file of old notes that I had collected about the 2001 computer HAL. A pervasive legend is that HAL was so-named to indicate that he was one step ahead of IBM. Alphabetically "H" "A" "L" precede "I" "B" "M" by one letter.

The author of 2001, Arthur C Clarke emphatically denies the legend in his book "Lost Worlds of 2001", claiming that "HAL" is an acronym for "Heuristically programmed algorithmic computer". Clarke even wrote to the computer magazine Byte to place his denial on record.

But Clarke's protestations are unconvincing in the extreme. For one thing "Heuristically programmed algorithmic computer" is a contrived name that does not properly form the desired acronym. For another, most of the working drafts of the 2001 story had HAL named "Athena", and it would have remained so had not Clarke deliberately rechristened it. The chances of him accidentally fastening on to the one name that mimics the worlds largest computer company are one in seventeen thousand. Why would Clarke deny it if it were true? I don't know. I don't know enough about the circumstances of Clarke or the legend to develop a theory.

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