HAL2001 was a Dutch

Netherlands

The Netherlands is a constituent country of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, located mainly in North-West Europe and with several islands in the Caribbean. Mainland Netherlands borders the North Sea to the north and west, Belgium to the south, and Germany to the east, and shares maritime borders...

 hacker con held at the University of Twente

Universiteit Twente

University of Twente is a university located in Enschede, Netherlands. It offers research and degree programmes in the social and behavioral sciences and in engineering. In keeping with its entrepreneurial spirit, the University is committed to making economic and social contribution to the region...

 near Enschede

Enschede

Enschede , also known as Eanske in the local dialect of Twents, is a municipality and a city in the eastern Netherlands in the province of Overijssel and in the Twente region...

, The Netherlands in August 2001. This site, which hosts one of Europe's major network operations centers, was unique in allowing the conference to have, at the time, the largest Internet uplink speeds of any conference: a fiber-optic connection in excess of 1 gigabit per second. The conference never fully utilized the bandwidth; maximum bandwidth use was approximately 200 Mb/s.

The name HAL was primarily due to the film 2001: A Space Odyssey

2001: A Space Odyssey (film)

2001: A Space Odyssey is a 1968 epic science fiction film produced and directed by Stanley Kubrick, and co-written by Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke, partially inspired by Clarke's short story The Sentinel...

, in which HAL is the name of the ship's artificial intelligence

Artificial intelligence

Artificial intelligence is the intelligence of machines and the branch of computer science that aims to create it. AI textbooks define the field as "the study and design of intelligent agents" where an intelligent agent is a system that perceives its environment and takes actions that maximize its...

. The name was retronym

Retronym

A retronym is a type of neologism that provides a new name for an object or concept to differentiate the original form or version of it from a more recent form or version. The original name is most often augmented with an adjective to account for later developments of the object or concept itself...

ed Hackers At Large.

The conference was held primarily outdoors. Logistically speaking, the network structure was quite a feat, with approximately 15 km of category 5 cable

Category 5 cable

Category 5 cable is a twisted pair cable for carrying signals. This type of cable is used in structured cabling for computer networks such as Ethernet. It is also used to carry other signals such as telephony and video. The cable is commonly connected using punch down blocks and modular connectors...

 for the ethernet

Ethernet

Ethernet is a family of computer networking technologies for local area networks commercially introduced in 1980. Standardized in IEEE 802.3, Ethernet has largely replaced competing wired LAN technologies....

 backbones, as well as supplying power feeds for the tents' computers.

There was a technology-free zone, The Solaris

Solaris (1972 film)

Solaris is a 1972 film adaptation of the novel Solaris , directed by Andrei Tarkovsky. The film is a meditative psychological drama occurring mostly aboard a space station orbiting the fictional planet Solaris. The scientific mission has stalled, because the scientist crew have fallen to...

 Sl@ckers S@lon, named for the 1972 film by Andrei Tarkovsky, which is often thought to be the Russian answer to 2001: A Space Odyssey. The only technology permitted in the place was a television, a DVD player running the movie, and a Turkish (electric) samovar for brewing tea. A fishtank was set aside for drowning mobile phones which rang in the tent (it remained empty).

This conference was run by Stichting HAL2001, a not-for-profit organization.

See also

• Previous conference: Hacking in Progress (1997)
• Next conferences: What the Hack (2005)
  What the Hack
  What The Hack was an outdoor hacker conference held in Liempde, Netherlands between the 28th and 31st of July, 2005. It is an event in a sequence that began with the Galactic Hacker Party in 1989, followed by Hacking at the End of the Universe in 1993, Hacking In Progress in 1997 and Hackers At...
  
  
• Hacking at Random (2009)
  Hacking at Random
  Hacking at Random was an outdoor hacker conference that took place in The Netherlands from August 13 to August 16, 2009.It was situated on a large camp-site near the small town Vierhouten in The Netherlands called the Paasheuvel...