The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign’s connection with pioneering computer research dates back more than 70 years and is so famous it once found its way into film.
In Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey,” the sentient computer, HAL 9000, that torments the crew of a spaceship was based on technology developed at the university’s Coordinated Science Laboratory. The real-life lab became the proving ground for ILLIAC, a succession of supercomputers first built in1952.
