Before the making of 2001: A Space Odyssey, IBM consulted with Stanley Kubrick. But as development progressed, he began to worry that the company would feel “swindled” by a film about a murderous machine whose name could be found by shifting each letter in “IBM” by one. Letters of Note has published correspondence between Kubrick and Roger Caras of Polaris Productions, with Caras offering assurance that though IBM was aware that “HAL actually causes human deaths,” the company would be fine as long as it was not singled out as an advisor on the computer — especially since HAL was “obviously not an IBM machine.”
‘Does IBM know that one of the main themes of the story is a psychotic computer?’
is a senior tech and policy editor focused on online platforms and free expression. Adi has covered virtual and augmented reality, the history of computing, and more for The Verge since 2011.
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