| Sumario: | Computer designers have long desired to harness particles of light, known as photons, to carry out computing tasks. Photons move faster than electrons, so optical computers work faster. They can also engage in parallel processing quite easily because photons are unlike electrons in that they do not tend to interfere with each other if they get too close. However, optical computers are relatively poor at storing and retrieving data. This problem has been addressed in different ways in optical computers developed by a team at the University of Colorado in Boulder and by AT&T Bell Laboratories and Scotland's Heriot-Watt University. The Boulder machine excels at its processing speed, while Bell Labs' machine has taken a novel approach to parallelism. Harry Jordan, one of the Boulder project's leaders, thinks that a combination of the two computers would provide real power and programmability as well as parallelism.
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