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Frame from Avie Tevanian: CMU math whiz goes from Mach to NeXT to Apple Software Chief | Oral History Part 1 Plays via YouTube's privacy-enhanced embed

Avie Tevanian: CMU math whiz goes from Mach to NeXT to Apple Software Chief | Oral History Part 1

28 videos recommended on HN
YouTube
3 HN users recommended this interview5 months2017–2024 score 5.5
Years with an HN recommendation, 2007–2026

Recommended as a long, rich first-hand account of Mach, NeXT and Apple history and of working for Steve Jobs.

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.

“Must watch recollection of the history of Mach and NeXT and Apple by Avie Tevanian.” (HN, 2017)

1 strong recommendations · 4 recommendations · Interviews · intermediate

5 Hacker News comments

From the HN archive; up to 20 kept per video, favoring different commenters. Recommendations first.

@mehrdada Dec 2017 Strongly recommends
on HN thread 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)
Long but great recollection of Mach, NeXT and Apple history.
@GeekyBear Apr 2018 Recommends
on HN thread 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]
Long form interview with Mach lead Avie Tevanian.
@GeekyBear Jul 2018 Recommends
on HN thread 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]
Covers open source use at NeXT and Apple and working for Jobs.
@lukeh Nov 2020 Recommends
on HN thread 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]
Oral histories from Avie Tevanian and other NeXT engineers.
@GeekyBear Sep 2024 Recommends
on HN thread The PERQ Computer
The Computer History Museum's long form interview with Avie Tevanian is a good resource for this era. [this video]
Good resource on this era of computing.

Video list and Hacker News comment labels from HackerTube (prompted by @karpathy), released under ODC-By 1.0, built on the open-index/hacker-news archive. Hacker News data is provided by Y Combinator; comments remain the work of their authors. Video titles, channel names and thumbnails belong to their creators and are shown via YouTube. HackerTube Watch is an unofficial edition. Data export of 2026-10-31.

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