The Internet has exploded, and with it - countless digital workspaces. Browsing, cloud storage, and note-taking applications are multi-billion dollar markets. Yet, each platform brings more complication, and more scattering of our digital content. Applications enter the market claiming they will “revolutionize thought” and “transform how we organize ideas,” but in the end, they just fragment our thoughts more.

These workspace applications falter and compete because they don’t know what they are really striving to be - they are striving to be the desktop. What Steve Jobs said the Macintosh would do in 1984 is what Notion says it will do today, but with an abstract simulation of the file system instead of the real thing. We believe nothing beats the performance of the native file system - but for 40 years its interface has been stagnant and overlooked.

Parchment combines the shareability and fluidity of the Internet with the simplicity and performance of the native filesystem. It overlays the filesystem and transforms each folder into a Space, which displays both local and web content. Files and bookmarks, Word Docs and Google Docs, are all organized under a central umbrella. They are organized based on the context of the data, not its medium.

In 1984, the year of the original Macintosh, project organization was easy. Make a folder on a topic, and there - that is its Space. Parchment again gives us a central Space for any idea - and allows us to think in terms of what we are working on, not where the data happens to be. This is how the computer was supposed to work - give structure to our knowledge of the world. Be a bicycle for the mind. The simplicity of 1984 meets the technology of 2022 - that’s Parchment.