Avadis “Avie” Tevanian, Chief Developer of Apple Mac OS X

Avadis “Avie” Tevanian was the senior developer of the Apple Mac OS X operational system. He earned a B.A. in mathematics at the University of Rochester, as well as his M.S. and Ph.D. in computer science at Carnegie Mellon University.

While studying in Carnegie Mellon, Tevanian along with Richard Rashid developed the Mach operating system, which would become the base of Mac OS X. Avie Tevanian worked in NeXT Computer and in Apple at the invitation of Steve Jobs, the founder of those companies. In fact, Steve Jobs was long-standing friends with Tevanian.

After Apple had acquired NeXT, Tevanian headed the programming technology department in Apple until 2003. In 2003, Tevanian was appointed the senior vice president of Software Engineering of Apple. There, Tevanian was the principal figure responsible for the development of Mac OS X.

Tevanian would eventually manage to release the new Apple operating system, a task which no one else succeeded in. Thanks to the engineering genius and managerial talent of Tevanian, Apple created an operating system that would become one of the best on the market, even though the first versions were slow and incomplete.

Tevanian also supervised the development of the further Mac OS X versions such as 10.0 Cheetah, 10.1 Puma, and 10.2 Jaguar, each faster and more functional than the previous. Avie Tevanian was the one who set the direction of the Apple operational system’s development for the years to come.