Optical technologies perform the basic computer operations of communications, switching, and storage, have already proven superior to electronics for many communications situations, and advances in devices and materials suggest that optics are important for switching and storage. The spatial light modulator (SLM) is one of the devices expected to play an important role in optical computing. An SLM acts as a piece of film whose transmittance or reflectance may be varied spatially and temporally by electronic or optical means. Types of SLMs, the use of optics for computation and three proposed, as well as diverse optical computing systems that use SLMs for interconnections are described in this article.