UN PEU DE CINÉMA

"...NASA, IBM, Honeywell, Boeing, Bell Telephone, RCA, General Dynamics, Chrysler, General Electric: all these corporate giants provided tons of documentation and even real hardware. They presented theoretical outlines, drew up instrument panels, and discussed in the minutes detail how astronauts of the future would spend their days: what kind of buttons they would press; how they would wash, eat and sleep; what kind of pyjamas they might wear.
Not surprisingly, a good number of brandname logos appear scattered around the 2001 sets (Nowadays the film industry regards 'product placement' as a valuable source of revenue).
Most of the companies were happy enough with the way things turned out. Except for IBM. They spent many months contributing date to the film, and were less than pleased when HAL 9000 turned out to be such a wrong 'un. The whole mess exacerbated when the press later noticed that the letters HAL were just one notch along the alphabet from IBM. Undouptedly this was a genuine coincidence. Even so, the world's biggest computer company didn't welcome their association with 2001's maverick mainframe, which was portrayed hijacking its own ship and then ruthlessly 'disconnecting' its human end-users. IBM logos were removed from much of the Discovery hardware, though they can still clearly be seen in the Orion spaceplane cockpit."

(From '2001: filming the future' by Piers Bizony with a foreword by A. C. Clarke, Aurum Press, London 200, page 91)