Avie Tevanian

Und weil wir gerade bei Betriebssystem-Halbgöttern sind, hier Dave Cutler's "Gegenspieler", der Mensch, unter dessen Ägide das Mac OS X entstanden ist: Apple Kurz-Bio Avie Tevanian und ein Interview mit seiner Hochschule (CarnegieMellon).

Und zwei Links zum Werdegang von NeXTStep zu Mac OS X:

• A Brief History of Mac OS X
  It would be an understatement to say that OS X is derived from NEXTSTEP and OPENSTEP. In many respects, it's not just similar, it's the same. One can think of it as OpenStep 5 or 6, say. This is not a bad thing at all - rather than create an operating system from scratch, Apple tried to do the smart thing, and used what they already had to a great extent.
• Architecture of Mac OS X
  Apple has leveraged a lot of existing open source software by integrating it well (usually) with their system: apache, bind, binutils, cvs, gcc, gdb, gimp_print, kerberos, mysql, openssh, openssl, pam, perl, postfix, ppp, python, rsync, samba, and many more BSD/GNU/other packages ... are all part of Darwin.