Avie Tevanian
Vice President of Software Engineering, Apple

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Apple's first rule about OS X (read "Oh-S-Ten"): don't talk about who's responsible for OS X. The Cupertino, Calif., computermaker is adamant that no one person should take the credit for the company's greatest leap forward since the original Macintosh. Not even, say, Avie Tevanian, chief software engineering guru throughout OS X's long and difficult development. Their second rule is that OS X must be regarded as the finest operating system ever created — a crash-free, easy-to-use, Windows-crushing thing of beauty. And on this point, there seems very little room for argument.

When a test version of OS X was released in September (the final version is due in the early months of 2001), users got a delicious foretaste: launch an application and its icon bounces around the "dock" at the bottom of the screen, as cheerfully as the Pillsbury Doughboy. Minimize a window and it's sucked into the dock like Jell-O through a vacuum cleaner. Menus are transparent, and colors look clean and rich enough to eat.

But more important than the flashy exterior is what's under the hood. The core of OS X, known as Darwin, is "open source." That means Apple is letting any amateur bug hunter look at the system's innards and suggest fixes. "We knew there was a community out there who would take our source code and do things with it we could never imagine," says Tevanian. Result: a kinder, gentler operating system, one you supposedly will never need to shut down.

Why is OS X so close to fruition when so many previous attempts at a next-generation operating system (including Pink, Raptor, Capone and Copeland) failed at Apple? Because Tevanian and his team made some very smart choices early on. They set up the system memory so that if one application crashes, it doesn't drag the rest down with it. And while they ditched most of the code from previous Mac systems, they made sure all your old stuff will continue to work.

So it seems that Tevanian — er, Apple — has created the near impossible: a super-friendly environment for computerphobics built on supergeeky foundations. "We knew we were building something good enough for two decades," says Tevanian. Maybe in 20 years' time, he'll finally be ready to take credit for it.

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