Avie Tevanian: CMU math whiz goes from Mach to NeXT to Apple Software Chief | Oral History Part 1
Why Hacker News recommends it
Recommended as a long, rich first-hand account of Mach, NeXT and Apple history and of working for Steve Jobs.
What it is
A Computer History Museum oral history with Avie Tevanian covering his math talent, work on the Mach microkernel at CMU, joining NeXT, leading NEXTSTEP development and the 1996 Apple acquisition.
Recommended by 3 HN commenters across 5 different months, 2017 to 2024.
What Hacker News said
Strong rec mehrdada · 2017-12 · on “Apple and NeXT announce merger (1996)”
Must watch recollection of the history of Mach and NeXT and Apple by Avie Tevanian. Long but great. 1/2] [this video] (early days) 2/2] [LINK] (around Apple acquisition and beyond)
Recommends GeekyBear · 2018-04 · on “Fuchsia is not Linux”
Correct. The Mach research project at Carnegie Mellon aimed to build a replacement kernel for BSD that supported distributed and parallel computing. Next's VP of Software Engineering, Avie Tevanian, was one of the Mach project leads. Richard Rashid, who lead the Mach project ended up running Microsoft Research's worldwide operations. Their work on a virtual memory subsystem got rolled back into BSD. [LINK] The Computer History Museum has an interesting long form interview with Avie: Part 1: [this video] Part 2: [LINK]
Recommends GeekyBear · 2018-07 · on “The secret call to Andy Grove that may have helped Apple buy NeXT”
The Computer History Museum has one of their long form interviews with Avie Tevanian, who led the creation of Mach (multiprocessor BSD) as his Ph.D project. (His faculty advisor went on to head Microsoft Research) Next and Microsoft both sought to hire him, and he eventually went on to be in charge of the OS at Next and later Apple. One of the topics he covered in the interview was how Next (and Apple) decided to use and contribute back to open sourced software at the lower levels of their stack. He also covers what it was like to work for Steve Jobs. [this video]
Recommends lukeh · 2020-11 · on “The Best of NeXT Collection”
I haven't watched it in a while, but you will probably enjoy Avie's oral history (along with Blaine Garst and Steve Naroff's). [this video]
Recommends GeekyBear · 2024-09 · on “The PERQ Computer”
The Computer History Museum's long form interview with Avie Tevanian is a good resource for this era. [this video]