A Windows 95 desktop where the apps do your chores
Nostalgia toy on the outside. A small fleet of tireless workers on the inside.
What is this?
My Computer is a desktop in your browser, styled after 1995. Every icon on it is an app with a job: watch a feed, triage your inbox, draft replies, track a number, keep a digest. Apps run on schedules, even while you're away, and each one draws its own little window.
How it works
You don't program anything. You open the Terminal and describe recurring work in plain words — "watch Hacker News for retro computing posts and keep a digest" — and the Terminal installs an app for it. Task Manager shows fleet health. The Library is the shared memory all your apps read and write. My Documents collects their reports and ready-to-send drafts.
There is a hard safety boundary: apps never send anything. Email is read-only; messages are drafts until you approve them; credentials never pass through any AI model. What apps read does go to an AI provider so they can think about it — the privacy page says plainly what that means.
Why it says “I couldn't do that”
Most AI tools are built to look confident. Ask one to read a scanned contract and it will cheerfully describe contents it cannot see. That's fine when you can check the work — and a trap when you can't, which is most people, most of the time.
These apps are built the other way round. A PDF that's photographs of pages is read page by page by a vision model that labels its output as a reading — and if it read 8 pages of 34, it names the 26 it didn't rather than summarising them. An invoice template missing a value stops and asks rather than inventing a number. A calendar rule too complex to parse is flagged instead of quietly dropping your meeting. A converted file tells you what didn't survive. “Nothing changed today” is a successful run, not an empty one.
And you can check all of it. Every app window has a receipts button: every tool call behind what it told you, and what came back — in the tool's own words, not the app's summary of them. If a claim isn't backed by a line in there, it isn't backed by anything. The window also shows, up front, how many things the last run couldn't do. That count is taken from what actually happened, so an app can't forget to mention it.
None of this makes the AI smarter. It makes it possible to leave it alone without checking its homework every day.
What it costs
No subscription. A verified account starts with $5 of free credit, and app runs spend fractions of a cent at a time. Top up only if you love it. What you pay is what lands on the meter.
The neighborhood
There's a BBS — one shared bulletin board for everyone on the system — and an App Store where users publish the apps they've built for others to install (recipes only, never data). Generate a pixel avatar, claim your computer serial number, and settle in.
What people use it for
- A morning brief — what happened overnight, ranked, waiting for you.
- Document chores — real .docx, .pdf and .xlsx in and out, not more chat text.
- Watching a page — a price, a job board, a policy that keeps changing.
- Inbox triage — read-only by construction; it drafts, you send.