A new operating system, built from the ground up
StrandsOS lets people and organisations work together as one system while each stays in control of what's theirs. Share exactly what's needed: a dataset, a service, a single answer. Nothing more, and only for as long as you choose.
In active development · running today on real PCs and virtual machines
Most software asks you to hand everything over to a service and trust it with the rest. Strands turns that around. Whoever owns the data, whether a person, a lab, a company or a public body, keeps it, and grants others access to exactly the part they need, for exactly as long as they need it. Withdraw the grant and the access stops.
One dataset, one service, one answer. The rest of your system stays yours.
The same application runs on a single PC or across many machines and locations, unchanged.
Every grant can be scoped, time-limited, audited and withdrawn.
Some of these work today on our test systems. Others are what Strands is designed for and are still being built. Each is labelled.
Your hospital keeps your records safely off-site, but it cannot read them: the copy it holds is sealed. Your doctor can read them because you said so, even while your own computer is switched off. Change your mind, and the access stops.
Show you're over 18 without revealing your birthday. Answer the tax office's questions without opening your whole file. You approve each answer, and each organisation gets the information it needs, rather than the information it wants. No central directory, no universal identifier, nothing to trawl.
Imagine a collaboration on the scale of ITER or CERN: dozens of institutions, each running its own experiments and building its own analysis. With Strands, every lab keeps its own systems, builds its analysis from reusable pieces, and shares a chosen piece or dataset with a partner, not its whole infrastructure. Partners plug what they've been given into their own work, and every grant can be withdrawn.
Every workstation, server room and office runs the same system, so there is one thing to learn, secure and update, all from a desk. Install software only from publishers you've chosen to trust, and cut a machine off the moment you stop trusting it. Give a supplier the one service they need. Let staff bring their own identity to work, with the company's access ending when the job does.
Keep your medical self, your driving record and your gaming persona apart, with no way to link them unless you choose to. The family's machines work as one, and each person stays in charge of their own.
Strands is built around events: work happens when something happens, instead of everything checking constantly. That suits control rooms with many screens and inputs, and edge sites that need to respond promptly and report only what matters.
The big picture
Every country's air navigation service runs its own systems and answers for its own skies. Yet every flight has to pass smoothly from one to the next, with each side sharing exactly what the handover needs, and nothing it shouldn't.
Independent authorities, each in full control of its own part, working together as one system: that is the shape of problem Strands was designed for. It is a vision, not a product, and nobody is flying on it. But it's the reason Strands is built the way it is.
Applications are assembled from small, self-contained pieces with clearly declared connections, so a single piece can be reused, rewired or shared on its own.
Your data lives in sealed containers you hold the keys to. Others can store copies for you without being able to read them, and you decide which answers leave.
You don't sign in to someone else's service. You grant them a specific, time-limited permission, and you can withdraw it.
Strands treats a piece running on another machine exactly like one running on yours, so the same application scales from one PC to many sites.
Software is admitted because you trust who published it. Withdraw that trust and connections are cut straight away.
A workstation and a server run the same system image and differ only in the role they start in.
StrandsOS is a new system, not a Linux or Windows distribution. It runs software written for Strands rather than existing desktop applications.
StrandsOS is not on general release yet. We'd like to hear from research groups, organisations, public bodies and individuals with a problem shaped like these: many parties, each in control of its own part, needing to work as one. Tell us what you'd use it for.
strands@allanassoc.com