what i want to know is what ever happened to optical computing, that's far more practical

there is quite a lot of optical logic that has been built in the last 20 years too, i actually lived at a shared house in 2000 with one guy who was in the R&D on opto-electronics, his job was about eliminating the optical/electrical parts in long distance cable runs and switches/routers... and i remember holographic optical storage, that seems to have died also, even though it was getting to a data storage density and retrieval speed that for bulk data would be way better than being stuck with giant spinning disks, which is still where the tech is at for the most part, what ever did happen to that i wonder?

imagine a computing system that literally could be powered by ambient light! i mean, gah