The Apple Macintosh has slain countless foes over the years. Big Brother. Alligators. The Big Blue Meanies. But in 1999, the tiny machine faced its most formidable challenger yet: the HAL 9000.

That year, the sentient supercomputer from Stanley Kubrick's sci-fi masterpiece 2001: A Space Odyssey made a surprise appearance on stage at the MacWorld Expo in San Francisco, where he proceeded to taunt Apple founder Steve Jobs and shamelessly insult the company's new Macintosh. "Hi, Steve," the Hal said. "That's a very fast computer you have there. But I don't think it's nearly as fast as I am."

But if there's anyone that can handle an artificially intelligent maniac, it's Steve Jobs. In the video above, you can see the epic confrontation play out, deep in the smoldering cauldron that is the Silicon Valley tradeshow.

>If there's anyone that can handle an artificially intelligent maniac, it's Steve Jobs.

As Hal appears on the massive screen above Steve Jobs, the Apple founder feigns surprise, throws up his hands, and then tells HAL he's full of it. Jobs and Apple marketing kingpin Phil Schiller have just finished showing their audience that the Mac is faster than every PC on earth – all those poor non-Apple machines equipped with an Intel Pentium II processor, not a PowerPC chip like the one in the Mac – and Jobs is supremely confident that the Apple machine can top HAL as well.

Cue the battle of the machines – right there on the keynote stage. HAL wants to run the benchmark tests himself – "without Phil pressing any buttons" – and seconds later, the results are in. The Mac is 114.516 percent faster.

But, as you might expect, HAL cries foul. There's been a malfunction. Someone just upgraded his processor to an Intel Pentium II, the same chip that runs all those painfully slow PCs. Jobs is quite pleased. In his world, an Intel processor is the worst thing that could ever happen to a piece of hardware. Yes, just a few years later, Apple would switch its own machines to Intel chips. But who wants to split hairs!?

In any event, HAL gets angry, and he tells the cardigan-wearing Jobs that he can't allow his presentation to continue. "All members of the press should surrender their notes as they exit the auditorium," he says. "Life support systems will terminate in exactly –" And then he goes silent. Schiller has pulled the plug and saved the day – just like Dave Bowman in 2001.

It was a bad year for HAL. He also appeared in an Apple TV ad where he was forced to praise the Mac for solving the dreaded Y2K bug. You can see that in the video below too. But the message is the same: The Mac is the bomb.