12.08.2002 Updating of the HAL site is still in progress and some links are still not working. Please be patient and report broken links if you are so motivated.
2.09.2002 Finally got the HAL 1.0 Screen Saver up for download. It took a lot longer than I thought it would, but hope you think it was worth it. It's probably as much as I can do to it without more reference material in the form of screen captures or still images from the film's production.
I think over the last two years with the help of several people I've tracked down every possible image that could be found. Still from time to time rare things do pop-up like the short film "The Making of 2001" which my friend James discovered recently though it contained no images of HAL or his screens curiously enough. It was made in 1965 or 1966 as best I can tell and featured filming on the sets at MGM while the scenes on the Discovery's centrifuge set.
If anyone out there thinks they have images of HAL screens not featured in the screensaver, please let me know via email.
Thanks to everyone who helped on the screensaver; Dennis Gonzales for all the reference image hunting, Wally Fields for recreating HAL's voice, Matt Willson for his AE-35 wireframe source model and Mike Drennan for helping convert the Flash projectors. A great big thanks guys for all the help.
3.20.2001 On Saturday March 17, 2001 Tripod removed hundreds of fan sites on it's servers with no warning or stated reason whatsoever to the site owners. The HAL site there containing the Guestbook and the JPG screensaver was one of these. Salon.com had this article about it today
Today I checked and the HAL Tripod site was once again back on-line again with no notice so I can only surmise that Tripod has rethought their embarrassing deletion of sites. I am in the process of moving files away from the Tripod site and finding an better guestbook service. If any visitors have recommendations for such a guestbook service, please write me.
3.17.2001 Well, Tripod has for some reason decided to remove the old HAL site containing the original JPG screensaver with no reason, notice or warning given so several weeks of guest book posts are gone and all of those files there are no longer available. If anyone wishes access to the JPG version of HAL, drop a line and they will be reposted here.
1.12.2001 Today is HAL's four birthday (or 9th if you go by the film date) and the site is now almost four years old as well.
The promised update to the HAL Flash Screen Saver is still under construction. It's been a hectic few weeks since the holidays and I just haven't been able to quite get it finished. Soon, soon....
9.11.2000 Well, the overhaul begun in April took a turn as I started learning Flash . I then broke my ankle the last Sunday in May and the whole upgrade to the site went on hiatus. So I'm just now getting back to it. I'll be polishing the rough edges and tidying the final design up during the week...
I've been feverishly working on a Flash version of the HAL Screen Saver to satisfy all of you who ask, when will it be animated. It's not finished yet, but it's getting there. Paying stuff has to come first in the life of a photographer/graphic designer/web site builder/general goofball...
The never ending quest to make sure ALL the links are still working goes on, so if you find something broken, please let me know.
That's about all there is to tell you about HAL at the moment, but stay tuned as there are some exciting new things in store as we approach the real year 2001!
4.20.2000 Finally, time for an overhaul of the site. I think the nature of this is pretty straightforward.. Hope you enjoy it...
There'll be some new and exciting things concerning HAL cropping up soon, so keep checking back! Also, check out the alt.movies.kubrick newsgroup if you're a Kubrick fan... Always some lively discussion going on there.
11.9.1999
HAL will be three years old on January 12, 2000.
Or eight years old if you go with the movie version of HAL's birthday.
The HAL Corporation site is a almost three years old too. It began it's life as a fun way to try out html and java, but it's made me a lot of new friends all over the world. Thanks to everyone who has written in and made suggestions and contributions!
If you have comments or suggestions, please don't be bashful. Email me, I'd love to hear from you. And don't forget to sign the guestbook. Or try out the Links Page for more sites for 2001 and HAL on the Web.
12.10.1997
Dr. Nigel Eastmond who created the MacHAL and WinHAL Start-Up screens for all us "2001" fans has reported to me that he has received calls from the Daily Telegraph and the BBC inquiring about his "Hibernation" process!
We included the faux press release after wondering what such a release would look like, thinking that sci-fi fans would get a kick out of the style of technobabble that is now more a of a trademark of the Star Trek genre, never dreaming that some reporter would not "get it". Since he had the medical background to make it believable, we gave it a shot and apparently it has fooled reporters from the mainstream media in his native England.
Evidently there are still a few people out there not well-versed in pop culture and who haven't seen "2001" yet! Sharp-eyed readers will noticed that I've changed the Hibernation Press Release page so that Dr. Eastmond will be harder for members of the media to find and pester him with silly questions about what we assumed would be clearly science fiction to any other informed persons...
Although, I still hold out hope that sometime in my life time that Nigel will have a blinding flash of scientific insight and figure out how it really could work. Then I could give out interviews to those tabloid news folk saying 'I knew him when...'
I guess the Internet really is a dangerous place after all! It's crawling with story-hungry reporters! :)
BTW, thanks to everyone who has stopped by and written in over the last couple of months. It's been really great hearing from you and getting your suggestions.
Real life will start imitating art a bit next summer when construction on the new International Space Station begins. At least we'll be getting a bit of the Clarke/Kubrick future, even if we don't get HAL by 2001...
4.22.1997
The HAL9000 page began as my past time to teach myself html page layout. Also I wanted to teach myself a thing or two about creating some of the effects that I liked that I'd seen on the web and to try to create things I hadn't seen...
I'd been reminded back in January by WIRED magazine that HAL's fictional birth date had passed this year. See the WIRED story from the January 1997 issue. Also see if you can spot the glaring error on the WIRED HAL cover. Looking through the site's celebrating HAL's birthday, I was surprised to see only one simulation of HAL on line. I started thinking how hard could it be? An interactive HAL is pretty much limited not only by the technical limitations of the web, but by the fact that HAL-type interactivity is primitive at best in the most advanced computers.
And there's precious little of Douglas Rain's voice doing HAL and even less ways that you can snip it up and rearrange it. For myself, I hope that Douglas Rain will one day license his voice to be used when computers start really talking...
I hope that my other computer sitting next to it will have Majel Barrett Roddenberry's voice. For those of you who don't know who Majel is, she's the widow of "Star Trek" creator Gene Roddenberry and the not only performs the computer voice for various "Star Trek" series, but also portrayed the character of Nurse Chapel in the original TV series and Lwaxana Troi in the Next Generation series. Another great computer voice...
I did my best to recreate the look of the main HAL terminal in the Habitat Ring of Discovery, though I may come back some Saturday afternoon and redo the flanking eight monitor screens. They were the first thing I made and they have room for improvement. I recently froze my VCR on the patch on uniform worn by Roy Scheider in the air braking scene of "2010" and realized there was enough detail to be seen to fire up Adobe Illustrator and make a "NCA" logo. I never found a suitable frame in "2001" that I could make out the similar shoulder patch on the crew uniforms.
In "2010" I noticed that the patch that appeared on the shoulder of the space suit Keir Dullea wears is the same as the one everyone else wears in the movie, not the blue on blue patch of "2001". I guess everything was really recreated from scratch for "2010". The more versed devotees of the films will know these details better than me...
You might have noticed that the link to NCA kicks you to NASA on the previous page. They still control the manned space flight for now. The other logo things are just my imagination. As I understand it for the "HAL's Legacy" book, IBM was set to have their logo plastered everywhere in the original film 'til they found out HAL kills the crew, and withdrew at the last minute.
After years of looking at 60's and 70's era logos in graphic design magazines like PRINT, Communication Arts and Graphis, I decided to try and mimic that era of geometric logos that rarely seemed to relate any sense of the company or corporation they stood for. If there was such a logo designed for the movie, I've never seen it. If you know of such a logo, please email me and enlighten me.
Feel free to copy the above HAL gif and put it on your site with a link to me. Let me know what you think of the site and any thing you think I left out or didn't get quite right. Thanks goes out to Brian James for his assistance in showing me the early errors of my way with html tables on the HAL Corporation page. His site is the Personal Odyssey link below.
Anyway, here are some links to the best sites celebrating Arthur C. Clarke's classic story and the two movies; Kubrick's "2001: A Space Odyssey" and Peter Hyams' "2010"
Start with the mother of all site's celebrating HAL and "2001" Cyberfest 1997 site.
There's a great book out now that you can read large excerpts from online; "HAL's Legacy; 2001's Computer As Dream &Reality ".
Then there's my favorite site dedicated to the original Kubrick film 2001: A Personal Odyssey.
Then there's my favorite HAL interactive site, courtesy of some Java wizardry that I don't pretend to completely understand. HAL 9000 Simulator.
Also a site were you can find downloadable pictures and sound files from the movie The 2001 Internet Resource Archive.
This site made possible through a research grant from:
NATIONAL COUNCIL
ON ASTRONAUTICS
&
The United States
Astronautics Agency
Joint Partners with NCA and USAA
in the development of the HAL Processor Chip Array