Before Ex Machina’s Ava and Moon’s GERTY, there was HAL, the onboard computer that operates Discovery One in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. Bestowed with human personality, HAL has been essential in shaping our understanding and distrust of artificial intelligence. He is highly intelligent, an adept reader of emotions and, as it turns out, capable of villainy.

HAL 9000, commonly known as HAL, was built at the HAL plant in Urbana, Illinois, on January 12th, 1992. His first instructor was Dr Chandra, who programmed his various capabilities, which include speech, speech recognition, expressing emotions, playing chess and operating the systems on Discovery One. In the original 2001 novel by Arthur C. Clarke, it is explained that HAL is unsure of how to resolve the conflict between his duty to relay information accurately to the crew and mission-specific orders to withhold the true nature of the Discovery One mission.

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HAL is an in-built part of the Discovery One spacecraft and is charged with maintaining the ship’s mechanical and life-support systems. To help him in this duty, he has several "eyes" placed around the craft. Much to the surprise of Mission Control and the crew, HAL ends up making a false prediction about a technical fault. By this time, Dr. David Bowman and Dr. Frank Poole are becoming suspicious of HAL’s behaviour and agree to remove him from service.

Having learned of the pair’s plan to pull the plug on him, HAL decides to kill Poole while he is out repairing the supposedly faulty AE-35 unit. Bowman goes out to retrieve the body of his friend. Meanwhile, HAL shuts off the life support of the rest of the crew and blocks Bowman’s re-entry. After gaining entry into Discovery One, Bowman makes his way to the computer’s memory centre, where he seeks to erase HAL’s memory.

He manages to identify and remove the memory tablets that control HAL’s higher functions, prompting a slow slump into algorithmic unconsciousness. As his logical faculties dissolve, he begins releasing information programmed in his early life, such as the date he was built and the song ‘Daisy Bell’. His final act is to play a pre-recorded message explaining the real purpose of the Discovery One Mission.

Speaking to Joseph Gelmis in 1968, Stanley Kubrick explained: "The computer is the central character of this segment of the story. One of the things we were trying to convey in this part of the film is the reality of a world populated — as ours soon will be — by machine entities who have as much, or more, intelligence as human beings, and who have the same emotional potentialities in their personalities as human beings. We wanted to stimulate people to think what it would be like to share a planet with such creatures."