Upon being informed that IBM stands for “International Business Machines” my 8 year old pointed out they sound like a toilet manufacturer.

Related fun fact: HAL Laboratories, the studio that makes Kirby games, named themselves HAL to 'stay one step ahead of IBM'

@jefframes Huh, I knew that HAL in "2001" was basically one-letter ahead of IBM, but had not even heard of HAL Laboratories till today 🙂

Do you happen to know if they used the name before "2001" was written (or the movie released) or after? I guess I can look it up (and probably will) but just thought you might know ...

@jefframes OK, there's an inconclusve discussion about this subject in this Reddit thread 🙂
https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/97zqyq/til_kirby_creator_hal_laboratory_got_its_name/

@f hah yea you dug in quite a bit more than me. When mentioned about the company with an egg laying dachshund logo, I thought - yea that makes sense.

It’s a little less cool when you consider they just lifted it from space odyssey and used the same reasoning. Hopefully that wasn’t it!

@jefframes Yeah, not sure if they lifted it or not ... it's certainly possible that two different groups came up with the same thing at different times 🙂

Like the whole VMS -> WNT thing. I've been fascinated by both that and HAL -> IBM thing but never really knew if either was just coincidence or deliberate ...