Deta's Space OS Aims To Build the First 'Personal Cloud Computer'

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: Here's how your computer should work, according to Mustafa Abdelhai, the co-founder and CEO of a startup called Deta. Instead of a big empty screen full of icons, your desktop should be an infinite canvas on which you can take notes or watch movies or run full apps just by drawing a rectangle on the screen. Instead of logging in to a bunch of cloud services over which you ultimately have no control, you should be able to download software like PC users did 20 years ago, and the stuff you download should be completely yours. All your apps should talk to each other, so you can move data between them or even use multiple apps' features simultaneously. You should be able to use AI to accomplish almost anything. And it should all happen in a browser tab. For the last couple of years, the Berlin-based Deta has been building what it calls "the personal cloud computer." The product Deta is launching today is called Space OS, and the way Abdelhai explains it, it's the first step in putting the personal back in the personal computer. "Personal computing took a dive at the turn of the century," he says, "when cloud computing became the big thing. We all moved to the cloud, moved our data, and we don't own it anymore. It's just somebody else's computer." Deta wants to give it back. [...] Deta's idea is both a very new one and a very old one. It harkens back to the early days of computers when you bought software in a box at a store and installed it on your computer. The cloud era, of course, made computing vastly easier and more powerful but also systematically ate away at the idea that you could control anything on your devices. It's an interesting thought experiment, actually: if every cloud service shut down tomorrow, what would be left on your phone or your laptop? Odds are, not much. Deta's trying to undo that a bit, to embrace the cloud and the expansive universe of apps while giving you back the feeling that your computer -- and everything on it -- is yours and no one else's. Because your computer should be yours -- even if it's on somebody's server.

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