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In the film, HAL is depicted as being capable not only of speech recognition and natural language understanding, but also lip reading.
After HAL manufactures an onboard crisis, astronaut David Bowman is forced to shut HAL 9000's higher cognitive functions down, an experience equivalent to death for HAL. HAL's central core is depicted as a room full of brightly lit computer modules mounted in arrays from which they can be inserted or removed. Bowman shuts down HAL by removing modules from service one by one; as he does so, we witness HAL's consciousness degrading until he is merely a computer.
Many people believe the name was taken from IBM (because H precedes I, A precedes B, and L precedes M alphabetically). Arthur C. Clarke denied such wordplay (even having one of his characters deny it in the sequel 2010: Odyssey Two), saying that the name actually means Heuristically programmed ALgorithmic computer. Many find this denial unconvincing. (Note that the HAL 9000 nameplate is modelled on similar nameplates for IBM mainframe computers).
It should be pointed out that most visual designs in any movie based on a book are designed by individuals other than the author. The physical similarities may have been intentional, but more likely reflected an idea of what people expected a large computer to look like.
HAL 9000 has at least one Earthbound twin, SAL 9000, used as a reference system for HAL, which does not generate the predictions of failure of Discovery's AE35 communication link.
The HAL computer may have been the inspiration for the HAL/S computer language used to program the NASA Space Shuttle's computers.
See also: computers in fiction