Arthur C. Clarke witnessed the 1961 Bell Labs 'Daisy Bell' demo and wrote it into HAL 9000's death scene in 2001: A Space Odyssey

The most famous scene of machine death in film — HAL 9000 singing "Daisy Bell" ever more slowly as astronaut Dave Bowman disconnects its memory in 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) — has a documented real-world source. Arthur C. Clarke visited his friend John Pierce at Bell Telephone Laboratories and, per the Library of Congress essay, "took special note of this singing and talking computer." He later scripted it into HAL's shutdown, where the AI "sings 'Daisy Bell' as power ebbs out of his circuits."

The scene is therefore a near-direct transcription of the 1961 Bell Labs demonstration in which Max Mathews, John Kelly, and Carol Lochbaum first made a computer sing. What began as a lighthearted engineering party trick — a Victorian bicycle-duty pun sung by an IBM 704 — acquired its ominous meaning only when a novelist standing in the hallway carried it into fiction seven years later. The bridge from lab to legend is a single visitor's memory, not any property of the machine or the song itself.

The same demo's central figure, Mathews, is the namesake of the visual programming language Max, closing a loop back to the LabVIEW/Max dataflow thread.