[Noughmad]

While HAL does stand for Hardware Abstraction Layer in general, the page you linked is for a specific piece of software that was used by previous versions of KDE and Gnome for this purpose.

[mVChr]

True, good clarification. I had visited the more general page also[1] but thought the other was more relevant to the email thread.

And definitely much better than my only other inkling for what that meant in relation to computer systems.[2]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hardware_abstraction

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HAL_9000