Avadis

ver the past few years, Avadis "Avie" Tevanian and his engineering team have blurred the line between fantasy and reality when it comes to what can be accomplished with software.

"I am particularly proud of the Mac OS X,it signified a whole new era in personal computing. Never before had an interface combined the power and stability of Unix with the Mac's legendary ease of use," says Apple Computer's chief software technology officer, who was named to the position this past July.

Tevanian's experience goes far beyond his years with Apple, however. He first earned recognition in the software field at Carnegie Mellon, where he was designer and engineer of the Mach operating system. Tevanian then joined NeXT as a NeXTStep engineer in January 1988, where he applied that Mach expertise to Steve Jobs' post-Apple computing vision. Tevanian managed a team responsible for porting NeXTStep to RISC-based systems and was behind the development of Portable Distributed Objects, the NeXT technology that made it possible to develop software on multiple operating systems.

Tevanian says he has built an organization at Apple that is capable of just about anything, and that the team has laid a foundation for unprecedented future innovation in software, both inside and outside the operating system.