NeXT's Missing History from Avie Tevanian and the Computer History Museum

I recently reviewed Geoffrey Cain’s Steve Jobs in Exile and complained that the book had proven to me that what I wanted most from Jobs’ NeXT years was to get the engineering biography of the NeXT workstation and NeXTSTEP OS. While Cain plugged the Isaacson-shaped hole in the narrative history of Jobs' life, the technical history was missing a major piece. In short, I wanted to know “how Avie Tevanian’s Mach microkernel and OOP-rooted primitives became the software heart of NeXT.” And that history was nowhere to be found.

It’s been found courtesy of the Computer History Museum’s long-form interviews with Tevanian.

These two clips don’t fully close that gap, but they’re the closest thing I’ve found.

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