In the early 80s, the demand for more energy-efficient electric lights was on the rise. After a protracted development starting in the 1973 energy crisis, General Electric's Halarc Electronic effort to develop a miniature metal halide lamp to replace incandescents bore fruit in 1981, producing a lamp with high luminous efficiency, good color rendering, and "instant" restart thanks to the incandescent filament (also used as an inductor for the ballast). It was designed to be the technologically advanced future of lighting.
It almost beat the markedly superior Philips SL, the first successful compact fluorescent bulb, to market in 1981. It didn't, though, and it sucked more than CFLs, in different ways, rendering it a complete failure (discontinued in 1983), with the exception of its arc tube technology. It's mostly interesting now because it's something that could have happened but didn't, and because it looks weird, is designed weird, and behaves weird compared to what we're used to.
