In (March?) 2007 (correction 2008) myself and two other engineers in front of Bruce Chizen - Adobe's CEO in a small conference room in Bucharest demoed a photo taken with an iPhone automagically showing as a file on a Mac. I implemented the local FUSE talking to Ozzy - Adobe's distributed object store back then, using an equivalent of a Linux inode structure. It worked like a charm and if I remember correctly it took us a few days to build it. It was a success just as much as Adobe's later choices around http://Photoshop.com were a huge failure. A few months later Dropbox launched.

That kickstarted about a decade in (actual) research and development led by my team which positioned the Bucharest center as one of the most prolific centers in distributed systems within Adobe and of Adobe within Romania.

But I didn't come up with the concept, it was Richard Jones that inspired us with the Gmail drive that used FUSE with gmail attachments back in 2004 when I got my first while still in college https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GMail_Drive. I guess I'm old, but I find it funny to see Launch HN: Regatta Storage (YC F24) – Turn S3 into a local-like, POSIX cloud FS