I know how much you like AI, so I reached out to mountaineer's buddy Chat and he said the following:

"The name "HAL" in 2001: A Space Odyssey comes from a clever play on letters. HAL is often interpreted as an acronym for "Heuristic Algorithmic Computer," though the filmmakers never explicitly confirmed that. More famously, the name was derived by shifting each letter of the word "IBM" (the computer company) one letter forward in the alphabet:

I becomes H
B becomes A
M becomes L

This gives us HAL—a subtle nod to IBM, which was a dominant tech company at the time. Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke, who worked on the film, were likely aware of this association, but they never explicitly pointed it out, leaving it up to interpretation."

Given your background, I suspect you're correct.