Oral History of Avie Tevanian - Session 1
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- čas přidán 21. 06. 2017
- Interviewed by David Brock, Hansen Hsu and John Markoff on 2017-02-21 in Mountain View CA, X8111.2017
© Computer History Museum
Born of Armenian parents in 1961, into a working class, entrepreneurial family, Avadis "Avie" Tevanian grew up in New England, the oldest of four boys. His dad a machinist, from a young age, Avie and his brothers were into building things, but Avie alone showed a particular aptitude for mathematics.
Having been introduced to a PDP-8 in high school, Avie enrolled at the University of Rochester after discovering they had a lab of Xerox Altos, on which he wrote several games and contributed to research. Avie continued on to graduate school at Carnegie Mellon University. Working under Professor Rick Rashid, another Rochester graduate, Avie started the Mach microkernel project, which quickly grew to over a dozen people. Based on concepts from Rashid's Accent operating system, Mach was to be an improvement on Accent by targeting parallel processors, be highly portable, and be able to run BSD Unix programs.
Engineers at Steve Jobs’ NeXT Computer decided they wanted to use Mach for NeXT’s operating system after they saw the work presented at a UNIX conference in 1986. Avie later attended a dinner in Palo Alto where Steve first relayed that interest. After finishing his dissertation, Avie joined NeXT, turning down an offer from Microsoft.
After only a year leading the core OS team, Avie became the manager of the entire OS group, and eventually took over as Vice President of Software after the departure of Bud Tribble. Under Avie's watch, NeXT completed its transition to the enterprise software business, porting the NEXTSTEP OS to Intel and various Unix RISC workstations, and coming out with WebObjects, the first object-oriented web application server, which could have become the basis for a NeXT IPO. These plans were scuttled upon Apple's acquisition of NeXT in late 1996, where Avie became Senior Vice President of Software.
* Note: Transcripts represent what was said in the interview. However, to enhance meaning or add clarification, interviewees have the opportunity to modify this text afterward. This may result in discrepancies between the transcript and the video. Please refer to the transcript for further information - www.computerhistory.org/collec...
Visit computerhistory.org/collections/oralhistories/ for more information about the Computer History Museum's Oral History Collection.
Lot Number: X8111.2017
Catalog Number: 102706886 - Věda a technologie
Avadis, what we can say… hard work, dedication and of course genuine genius talent. In history we can find unique individual that we can’t be replicated or copy… Einstein, Whitney Houston, Jobs, Wozniak, and many others that make our wold a bit better. I thank all those marvelous geniuses that make this two centuries what we are now.
Great interview. Humble, insightful and incredibly interesting guy. His impact on the industry was immense.
Andrew Richman that might be an understatement.
I hope to visit the Computer History Museum one day.
Awesome interview...Avie is one of the greats 🤓
Terrific stuff. Extremely well prepared and conducted.
Coming back to this a year later, I'd love to see Avie and Dave Cutler have a chat.
Being that I am the son of Armenian immigrants and worked at Apple for many years myself, Avie IMHO is somewhat of an unsung hero to me. It is no exaggeration that his work saved Apple.
Thanks for posting this. I'll have to visit the drive-in theater in Portland sometime. I miss when the Computer Museum was on the Boston waterfront.
Thank you for sharing this interview!
You're welcome!
@@ComputerHistorybvvn vgvbvhbbhvvgvvvnnnnvvvvvvbhvvvvgnnnnvvvbvgvvv bono duplica hhhvvvvvgbhv
This is great ... filling in some huge gaps for me
Thank you so much for amazing interview of such a humble & under appreciated genius. As developer of Mach and later NeXTSTEP which are the foundation of macOS & iOS, Tevanian's software is unknowingly used by countless millions. Tevanian could be considered the OS software Woz to Steve Jobs @ NeXT & later @ Apple when Jobs returned.
The Mach Kernel wasn't exclusively written by him, and the lead developer of Mach was Richard Rashid who later on founded the Microsoft Research division that created WindowsNT..
And the accent kernel from Carnegie Mellon University led to the mach kernel (which replaced accent), and all this kind of software is written/coded by hundreds of people and can't pin a whole system on just a singular person like you're doing...
@@foxsux6000 What was Richard Rashid's relationship to Dave Cutler re: Windows NT?
Is part two coming soon? This was terrific!
Please upload the rest of this interview.
Thanks for sharing this.
One of my software heroes..
Can you do one with Leslie Lamport?
Is this Part One of Two, maybe? It finishes rather abruptly.
Yea, I was thinking the same thing. What about his time at Apple?
czcams.com/video/NtpIFrOGTHk/video.html
N1 Armenian Programmer he is Genius , our pride
"Our?" Speak for yourself please. I never take pride in someone else's achievements, certainly not someone related THAT distant. Armenia contributed 0% to his development.
@@ArumesYT Yes, Avie is Armenian so that means he has nothing to do with Armenians. Makes totally sense
@@alphabeta1337 If that's the best reply you can think of, you just prove my point.
Avie for President!
For international audiences, it would be great to explain what the US school equivalents are. My understanding is 'Junior High' is similar to Australian (and European) years 8 through 10. Then Senior High is like years 11-12. College is sometimes 11-12 and/or first 3 years of University?
Junior high in the US is grades 7-8 , and regular high school is 9-12.
You don't have Google in Australia?
@@ArumesYT Uh-huh, yeah thanks for your 'contribution'.
@@rabidbigdog What did you expect? Do you seriously want to clog up every oral history with an explanation of all the different school systems in the world? Get a clue, kid.
Steve Jobs sure had an eye for talent. I always disliked the way the Jobs movie portrayed Avadis. It’s obvious that the movie got that part so wrong just to hype the main character. IMO, the work of Avadis and Jobs is the foundation that made Apple a trillion dollar company. NeXT, Mach, BSD, Postscript and all of that, I mean it’s the aggressive adoption of futuristic technologies thats Apple’s golden goose.
A suggestion for the interviewers at CHM ... How about starting all interviews off by mentioning from the outset what the interviewee is known for, as not everyone is aware of this fact and doesn't necessarily want to wait indefinitely until the story evolves. I'd find it much more interesting listening to someone's personal family background and history if I knew where the interview was leading to.
Starting with a short introduction is a good idea, but to be fair this information is available in the summary box (select "show more" depending on what you are using to look at this page and comment).
Wikipedia...
You found the video, you found the comments, you missed the part in between. Try again.
I was a bit fan of MC680xx CPUs in ~90s and now got some 881хх datasheets and yes -- this CPU was great for the time! I think it was a big commetce fail just becouse Russian E2K is the fail today -- too complicated to learn and write asm for. Dumb and easy intels overpower the market. (Intel's Itanium dead too BTW) P.S> MC56xxx DSP was great too! Very sad that Commodore did not used it in Amigas chipset pack. It had too be killer machine )))
"Always the different one" like Adam Cartwright.
I imagine, MIT and Stanford regretted their failure to comply with Avie's demands once Steve returned to Apple with Avie and the rest.
Avie, the correct way to say your name is Tev-uh-NYAN!
actually the host had the correct pronunciation of your name...
Depends. Being the 3rd generation, I can understand Avie's decision to just Americanize the pronunciation. Happens to a lot of surnames, including (to stay on topic) famous ones like Wozniak.
✌️✌️✌️👍👍👍👍👍💪💪💪💪🇦🇲🇺🇸
One of interviewers mumbles constantly. Don't you have someone with better articulation?