Arthur C Clarke Down

I found that the flashy-lights hyperspace bit just went on far too
long. 'Ooh look! Yet more meaningless coloured lights zinging across
the screen!' The very end only made sense after I'd read the book.

 

Having recently obtained the collected works, I find that his short
story writings have aged rather. I haven't read any of his longer
novels for a while.

 

Yes but that was Kubrick's fault, aided and abetted by Doug Trumbell, not
Clark's.

HAL 9000 was just one of Clark's great characters.

 

Character?

Hmmmmm..

Did anyone finally nail whether it was an IBM joke, or just coincidence?

 

Using the patented Mavis Beacon "Hunt&Peck" Technique, Lady Nina

S'troo, s'troo.

Oh yes. Many of them not house-trained.

 

Clarke himself insisted ("The Lost Worlds of 2001") that HAL stood for
"Heuristically programmed ALgorithmic computer."

 

I thought that came out in the book itself, or maybe in '2010'.

 

<calm voice>

I agree, Dave.

</cv>

 

It did, but he elaborated in Lost Worlds. He wrote, "As it happened, IBM
had given us a good deal of help, so we were quite embarrassed by this [the
suggestion that HAL was one letter ahead of IBM], and would have changed the
name had we spotted the coincidence."

 

Still sounds too good to be true.

 

I *knew* there was some link lurking in auxiliary reserve backup
memory somewhere. The initials. Thanks for reminding me.

 

Yeas it was a bit over extended, it could be cut in half.
What do folk think of the sequel?

 

"Speculative Fiction" is the term, I believe. But personal I think
Clarke wrote hard sf.

 

The Software language used on SpaceLab was called HAL-S.
'S' for SpaceLab.

 

Just found a copy of his famous October 1945 article in Wireless World
about geostationary satellites. Is this already on the web or would
anyone be interested in a scan?