I've seen some people complain about how the commlinks and other "new" forms of computing devices in Shadowrun are optical, and the people in question don't like it because they don't understand it. Well, maybe this is how they're doing it, because this is how we're about to.
It seems they've developed a new type of dye that changes its refractive properties when introduced to different forms of light, bending the light different ways without losing any of the information held in the optical medium. Ours only works as a liquid right now, but they have about 60 years to figure out how to get it to work as a solid. That should be enough time.