Deta is a company whose purpose is to design computing products to help people think better.

We want to create delightful experiences that enhance human intelligence in the many forms it presents, whether understanding, decision making, or creativity. That's our starting point.

Deta Surf is a notebook for the internet that aims to put us — the user — in the middle of the information we research, and help us think more clearly across it. Here's more of the context behind it.

Intelligence is context constrained 1

By way of Alan Kay's example — "only a genius could multiply" in ancient Rome 2. The context Roman numerals create doesn't support humans multiplying. We've since abandoned Roman numerals, and multiplication is everywhere.

Personal computers and web browsers

Personal computing is a wonderful idea. A machine that can simulate any media, but that's built around us. It reflects our tastes, has our stuff, and helps us understand, decide, and create.

Many of us are using personal computers every day. On them, we spend much of our time in the web browser. It's become the super-app, the main context. This makes sense, because the web is so engaging and powerful.

Artificial intelligence, next up?

AI is promised to be the next foundational change. Silicon Valley's biggest players are spending billions racing to make machines intelligent, compressing the rich tapestry of the web into chatbots that respond to — and remember — context we provide: a paragraph, an image, a computer program, a web page.

But just like human intelligence, these machinese are context constrained — effectiveness varies wildly with context. If we want AI to be useful to us, it needs to tie into our context.

Where's our context?

It's everywhere.

We think the web browser pulled the personal out of the computer. It scattered our stuff all over the web. We spend our time context switching between remote institutions who hold it, having no incentive to let it go.

This is a problem. Computers can be our best tool to help us better understand, decide, express and create. But without our context, and us in the middle of it, we may be using the internet with something like Roman numerals.

Deta Surf

Deta Surf is a notebook for the internet that takes a swing at this problem. It's early, but reflects ideas that we wanted to see for reclaiming our context, our place in the middle of it, and our role: not only as a consumer of the web, but as a creator.

Surf is modern, in the sense that you can plug the web directly into AI as you think through a problem and create something new. But its design was also inspired by much older ideas — personal computers & desktop operating systems & early browser environments like Hypercard & the analog notebooks that we still find ourselves going back to. Many decisions reflect this, and owe a deep debt to them.

Acknowledgements

The Deta Team,
past and present