"More like bleeding edge!" said Dr. Chandrasegarampillai. "I can't tell you who our supplier is, of course, but at the beginning, the GaN lasers used in H. A. L. 's holographic active memory blocks gave us all sorts of problems. Without the increased storage density made possible by the near UV wavelength, of course, H. A. L. would be severely causality-limited by the large size of the blocks. But until our vendor solved the external-feedback mode-hopping problem, H. A. L. was smart as a whip, but couldn't remember a thing. (...snide political joke deleted...) We had a few interesting failures, though, like the time H. A. L. 's wavelet compression template block readout laser had severe power level drift. Instead of turning off like the lasers we'd been used to, this one had it's power level go somewhat out of spec on the high side, frying our media. What a smell!"

"The other funny thing was that the early lasers leaked light all over the place. The whole holo lab would have this eerie violet glow, and our shirts would light up with fluorescence. The PR people just loved it. Yesterday, the came down to shoot some video. We had fixed the leakage problem, so there was no glow anymore. The director was p***ed, so we let him play with a UV lamp that one of the technician's kids had gotten for Christmas, and he was happy."

"H. A. L. 's other GaN components have worked like a charm. The solar-blind UV sensor array that H. A. L. uses for navigational star sensing is just the bee's knees, and though not really part of H. A. L. , I'm told that the GaN RF power amps perform pretty well in the avionics and communication gear. We've used the Nichia white LED's in some mundane places, mostly for reliability reasons. The NASA folks told me that they're using a scadful of the UV-LED's in the sanitation and execretory systems of Discovery, but those guys can have a funny sense of humor. "

"Believe it or not, H. A. L. loves reading MIJ-NSR for fun. It's not like he can go to the library and pick up a copy of Applied Physics Letters, you know. On his first day, we sent him out on the Web, and MIJ-NSR was one of the things he found. He's naturally curious and enjoys learning how some of his components work. We encouraged him to start on technical literature, since his physics and materials science knowledge is hard wired, and the concepts weren't too foreign for him. The story that you've probably read by now in the pop press that H. A. L. started on nursery rhymes is completely untrue. Do you really think we'd have H. A. L. worrying about daisies?"

For more information, or if you haven't heard of H.A.L., you might want to check out the UIUC H. A. L. web site.