For fun, I like to listen to oral histories from the Computer History Museum archive. I fell into an awesome Apple rabbit hole about the second act of Apple with Jobs and key members of the team behind it. This is the playlist with some of the notes.
CHM has been interviewing the NeXT and Apple engineers in three-hour sessions. Most of these have just a few hundred views, but they are packed with interesting stories and knowledge.
Steve Jobs in his own words
There are a lot of great Steve Jobs interviews convering Apple founding story and early stories. These four are the ones I keep going back to. But the details from the people who worked alongside him are what I find more interesting, and that is the rest of this post.
Steve Jobs, Santa Clara Valley Historical Association, 1994
29 minutes, interviewed by John McLaughlin, filmed at NeXT in Redwood City.
Recorded three years before he went back to Apple. He covers the founding of Apple, the Macintosh, being pushed out, and building NeXT.
Steve Jobs oral history interview, 20 April 1995
1 hour 23, interviewed by Daniel Morrow of the Computerworld Smithsonian Awards program.
This is the full unabridged recording. The Smithsonian hosts the transcript, and the Steve Jobs Archive has published it as “Pursue different paths” in 16 chapters.
Steve Jobs, The Lost Interview, 1995
1 hour 6, interviewed by Robert Cringely for the documentary Triumph of the Nerds.
Only about ten minutes of this aired. The master tape was considered lost until a VHS copy turned up in the director’s garage after Jobs died.
Steve Jobs at MIT Sloan, 1992
1 hour 12.
An hour on how NeXT actually made money, management practices, future of NeXTSTEP developers, OOP.
Before Jobs’s exile
The people who left Apple with Jobs in 1985 were Macintosh people.
Andy Hertzfeld
Second software engineer on the Macintosh team. 6 hours 20 across two parts, recorded September and October 2025.
Part 1 covers Hertzfeld joining the Apple II team in 1979, porting QuickDraw from Lisa to Mac, building much of the Toolbox, and his conflict with manager Bob Belleville, which Hertzfeld says contributed to his departure after the Mac launch. Part 2 covers Radius with Burrell Smith in 1986, Frox with Hartmut Esslinger, co-founding General Magic in 1990 with Bill Atkinson and Marc Porat, Eazel in 1999, then eight years at Google working on Photos, News, Plus and Glass.
CHM files part 2 under “Hartzfeld,” so a title search misses it.
Mike Markkula
Apple employee number three, wrote the Apple II business plan, on the board until 1997. 2 hours 35. Transcript.
On what Apple was buying in 1996, Markkula says: “what we wanted was the OS. And Avie Tevanian.” On Jobs returning with it: “I don’t think it was an issue. If he wanted to come back, fine, if he didn’t, fine.”
On the earlier IBM approach, Markkula says: “Lou Gerstner. It was his idea to buy Apple for a song.” On how the OS decision was made: “Gil is the guy that came to the conclusion that we needed to buy an OS. The other one we looked at was Be. And Jean-Louis had done a really good job with that, but it wasn’t finished.”
Skim for those passages, around pages 40 to 42 of the transcript.
Larry Tesler
Came to Apple from Xerox PARC and later founded Apple’s Advanced Technology Group. 8 hours 15 across three parts. Part 2 covers the PARC demos to Jobs; part 3 covers ATG and the Apple Fellows.
In part 3, Tesler explains what the Apple Fellows recommended around 1995: they debated porting the Mac OS to Intel, rejected it, and advised buying an outside OS, “either the NeXT operating system or the Be operating system.”
Bill Atkinson and Andy Hertzfeld on MacPaint
Atkinson describes Jobs recruiting him off an unfinished neuroscience PhD when Apple had 30 employees. Includes a live MacPaint 1.0 demo. 1 hour 20. Transcript.
Bruce Horn
Horn was at PARC from age 14 and was there during Jobs’ 1979 visit. He created the Resource Manager, resource forks and file Types and Creators, which is why the Mac did not need filename extensions. He later co-founded a company built on NeXT’s WebObjects. Wrote the Macintosh Finder.
Steve Wozniak
3 hours 4, University of Washington, 2006. A guest lecture in Ed Lazowska’s.
NeXT, 1985 to 1996
Five people left Apple with Jobs: Rich Page, George Crow, Susan Barnes, Bud Tribble and Dan’l Lewin.
Bud Tribble and Steve Jobs at a NeXT retreat, 1986
Tribble, NeXT’s founding software lead, says he was told to build a word processor with no feature spec and therefore cannot commit to the launch date. Jobs pushes on the date. Tribble holds.
Bud Tribble
1 hour 23, University of Washington, 2006. From the same course as the Wozniak lecture, it also circulates only as two reuploads without descriptions. I identified it by matching the guest roster: Lazowska, Kate Deibel, Mike Koss and Burton Smith are all UW or Seattle people.
Rich Page
NeXT co-founder and head of hardware. 5 hours 50 across two parts. Part 1 covers Page testing memory chips at Fairchild Semiconductor in 1972, moving to HP, then joining Apple in 1978 to work on the Lisa. Page says he convinced the Lisa team to drop a custom microcoded bit-sliced processor in favour of the Motorola 68000. He built large-screen, colour and portable Mac prototypes and became an Apple Fellow alongside Atkinson.
Part 2 covers NeXT manufacturing: the automated factory, the difficulty of making the magnesium cube, supplier relationships with Motorola and Canon, the second-generation NeXTstation, and the NeXT RISC Workstation, which never shipped. Page left in 1992, by which point every co-founder except Jobs had gone. He then founded Sierra Research and Technology, which made 10/100 Ethernet chips and was sold to TDK in 2000.
It is the only detailed account here of NeXT hardware.
Dan’l Lewin
NeXT co-founder, sales and marketing. 2 hours 43. Transcript. Lewin was selling Sony tape recorders and met Jobs in a meeting about Sony’s 3.5-inch floppy drive, which Apple went on to choose for the Macintosh. Jobs recruited him. He built Apple’s education sales and marketing, then followed Jobs to NeXT to sell the cube into universities. After NeXT: GO Corporation, Aurigin, Kidsoft, then Microsoft from 2001. He now runs the Computer History Museum.
Avie Tevanian, part 1
Author of the Mach microkernel, later Apple’s SVP of Software. 2 hours 31. Tevanian started Mach as a graduate student under Rick Rashid at Carnegie Mellon. NeXT engineers decided they wanted it after seeing it presented at a UNIX conference in 1986, and Jobs relayed the interest at a dinner in Palo Alto. Tevanian turned down an offer from Microsoft and joined NeXT. He ran the core OS team for a year, then the whole OS group, then became VP of Software after Tribble left.
Bertrand Serlet
AppKit engineer at NeXT, later Apple’s EVP of Software. 2 hours 52. Serlet was at Xerox PARC in 1984, then followed Jean-Marie Hullot from the French research institute INRIA to NeXT in 1989. He worked on the AppKit team and shipped OpenStep, then led the Foundation framework, then Enterprise Objects Framework and WebObjects. At Apple he led Rhapsody, which became Mac OS X, and took over software after Tevanian. He left in 2011 after recruiting Craig Federighi to replace him.
Blaine Garst
Tevanian hired Garst in 1990 to manage the Mach kernel team. With Serlet he added protocols to Objective-C. He implemented Distributed Objects, added reference counting to memory management, and wrote many of the original Foundation classes alongside Serlet and Ali Ozer. In 1996 he built the Objective-C to Java bridge that let WebObjects applications be written in Java.
Steve Naroff
Ran NeXT’s development tools. Naroff was at Stepstone, which sold Objective-C, porting the compiler to HP-UX and Apollo. He became the main engineer fixing the language for NeXT’s needs, felt Stepstone was not resourcing that work, and joined NeXT in 1988. There he integrated Objective-C into GCC and added categories to support Interface Builder. Later at Apple: director of Java technologies and developer tools, then Xcode, then Objective-C 2.0, then the LLVM/Clang front end from 2007 to 2010.
Naroff also co-wrote the language history with Brad Cox, who created Objective-C, and CHM curator Hansen Hsu: “The origins of Objective-C at PPI/Stepstone and its evolution at NeXT”, open access.
Glenn Reid
NeXT engineer, later built iMovie. Reid got into Adobe’s font group after writing Adobe a letter in PostScript. He joined NeXT in 1990 working on email and fax, left in 1991 to found RightBrain Software and ship a NeXT desktop publishing app. In 1998 Jobs hired him to build iMovie 1.0, which Reid says he built in nine months with two other engineers. He then led iPhoto through version 4 and was Director of Engineering for Consumer Applications until 2003.
Joanna Hoffman
Original Mac team, then NeXT. Start with part 2. Hoffman wrote the Macintosh business plan and followed Jobs to NeXT after 1985. She left NeXT after nine months. On the pitch she kept hearing: “Eighteen months we’re going to have this incredible product,” and then “not again!” about the focus on an unrealistic storage device. Hoffman thought the NeXT vision was too small for Jobs.
Hoffman’s assessment of how it turned out: “I keep saying the first Macintosh’s success was really Windows. But today’s Macintosh success is NeXT. You know? No question.”
Parts 1 and 3 cover Soviet Armenia and Poland, emigrating to Buffalo at 13, MIT and PARC, then what working for Jobs was like.
The acquisition and the return, 1996 to 1998
Avie Tevanian, part 2
Tevanian says NeXT went from first call to signed acquisition in under a month, and that days later Apple pre-announced a large loss, which took them by surprise. He covers the bake-off against Be from NeXT’s side, working under Amelio and then Jobs, pushing TCP/IP and open standards over Apple’s proprietary technology, the Intel transition, sunsetting Newton, Mac OS 9 and WebObjects, and his Microsoft antitrust testimony. He retired in 2006.
Tevanian also describes Fred Anderson phoning Ellen Hancock to fire her right after firing Amelio, and Hancock initially thinking the call was to make her CEO.
Jon Rubinstein
Ran Apple hardware from 1997 and later the iPod division.
Rubinstein started on 3 February 1997, the day the NeXT deal closed. He describes Apple as worth around $2 billion with one quarter of cash left, and says they hid him for three days because he was there to replace five division managers.
On Larry Ellison’s claim that Jobs had planned to retake Apple, Rubinstein says: “That is certainly not what I saw. Laurene didn’t want him to go back.”
The iPod material is in session 2. Rubinstein says IBM’s Microdrive group “laughed at me” when he asked for five gigabytes at his price. He found the Toshiba 1.8-inch drive at the end of a Japan roadmap meeting about something else, called Jobs in Tokyo to ask for a $10 million check, then called Fred Anderson to check it would clear. Phil Schiller supplied the scroll wheel, from an old Bang and Olufsen phone, and Apple patented it and licensed it back to B&O. The first iPod was 20 to 25 people in eleven months, and the launch moved a week for Rubinstein’s wedding.
Rubinstein also says Apple’s multi-touch origin story is “all nonsense,” and blames Verizon for killing the plan to put cellular in every laptop.
Regis McKenna
Marketed the Apple II and knew Jobs for 35 years. Part 5 of eight, 2 hours 3, scoped to 1985 through 1999.
McKenna reads from a dated notebook. His entry for 6 January 1997, after Jobs met Amelio: “they don’t appear to want help. They didn’t offer him a job.” For 9 August 1997, when Jobs phoned him: “What do you think about my new board?”
McKenna on Amelio’s executive hires: they “all wanted to be miniature Steve Jobs,” which he likens to the Hell’s Angels dressing up in a tuxedo. On Michael Spindler: “He could stand at a board and draw out a future strategy, and it would overwhelm you. He fell short in how you implement it.” McKenna turned Jobs down twice on rejoining.
Gil Amelio
Apple CEO from February 1996 to July 1997, and the person who bought NeXT. Transcript, 42 pages, interviewed by Jeff Katz and George Scalise in 2012.
Amelio on the state of the company when he arrived: “there were 300 R&D projects—300. I could make a case that maybe we needed 20 of those, and that might even been too big a number, but 300 was ridiculous.” He got it down to about 50. On manufacturing: “We were getting back—some months—as much as 10 percent of the computers we shipped.”
He went to Sun first. Scott McNealy wanted to buy Apple, and the question was whether the Mac interface could sit on top of Solaris. Amelio: “At the end of the day, Scott McNealy’s board turned us down. At that time, John Doerr was on their board, and I think he was, perhaps, most vocal in saying, ‘No, we shouldn’t make this connection.’”
Then Be, and in Amelio’s telling Gassee came to Apple rather than the reverse: “Jean-Louis Gassee approached us about the Be operating system, and I’m kind of glad he did because it gave us another contender in the stack.”
On choosing NeXT, Amelio says: “the NeXt operating system was the best choice out there. I would say virtually everybody felt like we shouldn’t touch it because of Steve Jobs. Every one of my board members and most of my staff told me forget about it.” He kept talking to Jobs anyway, because “if I couldn’t get Sun, then the third—whatever was third on the list was so far down the list that it really wasn’t a viable strategy.”
And on the decision that ended his own tenure: “I agonized more over the decision as to whether to bring Steve Jobs back more so than I think any other decision I made in my life.” His reasoning was that ten years after leaving, “it was still his company. His DNA was so much in that company.” Amelio on Jobs: “He didn’t understand technology, but he did understand user interface better than anyone on the planet.”
Amelio makes one claim I have not seen corroborated anywhere: that the iMac did not originate with Jobs. He says he killed the Performa, needed a new all-in-one to replace it, gave Ellen Hancock the job, and was “at least six months into that thing—maybe longer—when I ultimately left.”
There is also a 1998 audio interview with him by Paul Schindler, and his book, On the Firing Line.
Larry Tesler, 2013 session
Video listed above
Tevanian asked Tesler to go into the Advanced Technology Group, which Tesler had founded, and work out what was worth keeping. Tesler: “So I was sent back there to kill the organization I had founded, but I’m glad he did it.” Inside, Tesler found a project he describes as essentially Microsoft Surface, “15 years ahead of its time.”
John Sculley
Apple CEO 1983 to 1993, interviewed by David Greelish in 2011 and donated to CHM. Transcripts: part 1, part 2.
Sculley’s argument for not licensing the Mac OS: the models showed that it required about 25 percent market share, a higher OS price than Windows, and layoffs covering 70 to 80 percent of the workforce, while Microsoft charged OEMs “about $11 a copy.” He says that when he left, Apple was “the number one selling personal computer in the world” with an 8.3 percent worldwide share.
His most-quoted recorded moment is eight minutes at a Forbes conference in 2013, on May 1985.
Footage from the time
Macworld Boston, 6 August 1997. Jobs on stage, Gates by satellite.
The new board, then the Microsoft deal: cross-licensing, Office committed to the Mac, $150 million in non-voting stock. Gates appears on the screen behind Jobs and the room boos. Jobs later told Walter Isaacson it was “my worst and stupidest staging mistake of my life. It made me look small, and Apple look small.”
The 1997 WWDC fireside chat, 1 hour 11. Jobs taking developer questions while holding no title at Apple.
The first question is about OpenDoc, and Jobs says he is in favour of putting a bullet in its head. He also gives the answer about starting with the customer experience and working backwards to the technology.
The internal Think Different talk, 23 September 1997. 14 minutes, Jobs to Apple employees.
“Marketing is about values.” He also gives the media plan: the spot breaks that Sunday on ABC around the network premiere of Toy Story.
Also: Macworld January 1997, Amelio’s last keynote, a week after the acquisition was announced, and the first time Jobs and Wozniak were on an Apple stage together since 1984. And the WWDC 1997 opening keynote, where Amelio is still CEO, Tevanian and Rubinstein already run software and hardware, and a young Scott Forstall does a demo.
Mac OS X
Bas Ording
Designed the Aqua interface and later the iPhone UI. 2 hours 14. Transcript.
Jobs called Ording at home in 1998 to recruit him against an offer from MetaCreations. Ording describes the first multitouch rig as a FingerWorks touchpad with a paper overlay, projected onto a tablet and cabled to a Mac.
He says rubber-band scrolling started as a bug: he thought his code had stopped running when a list would not move, realised it was pinned at the top, and built the spring-back from that.
Nitin Ganatra on the Debug podcast
Audio. CHM has the transcripts of episodes 39 to 41.
Ganatra came up through Apple developer support and watched Copland fail from the support queue. He explains Carbon: Adobe and Microsoft would not rewrite for Cocoa, so Apple built a Mac Toolbox emulation layer. Tevanian says in his part 2 that there was never a formal date to turn Carbon off.
The Aqua unveiling, Macworld San Francisco, 5 January 2000. Also the keynote where Jobs drops the “i” from iCEO.
John Siracusa’s Mac OS X reviews, from the 1999 developer previews through 10.0. Text. This is where the NeXTSTEP-to-consumer-OS transition is documented in detail: Yellow Box and Blue Box, Carbon against Cocoa, Quartz replacing Display PostScript, the Finder. The pre-2012 URLs are legacy paths and need checking.
The iPhone
Nitin Ganatra
Director of iOS applications. 5 hours 55 across two parts. Transcripts: part 1, part 2.
Forstall pulled Ganatra off the OS X Mail team in late 2005, and he brought two Mail engineers plus Scott Herz and Alex Aybes with him. Part 1 covers the internal competition: P1, an iPod-derived phone under Tony Fadell, against P2, an OS X-derived phone under Forstall. P2 won. It also covers the web-versus-native fight over the built-in apps.
Part 2 covers why copy and paste and MMS were cut from version one, AT&T’s technical approval process, and the work of sanitising UIKit for public release.
Andy Grignon
Ran the iPhone radios. 3 hours 9. Transcript.
Grignon was an Apple ATG intern on QuickTime Conferencing, then at Pixo, which Apple contracted to produce the OS for the original iPod, then back at Apple for iChat and Dashboard. He describes himself as “the software mole from Forstall’s organization into Fadell’s.” He says he blew a live iChat demo in front of Jobs when the audio cut, and was excluded from UI review meetings afterwards. He once drove to Jobs’ house to debug the radio on Jobs’ personal iPhone. After Apple he followed Rubinstein to Palm to lead webOS.
Ken Kocienda and Richard Williamson
Built Safari and the iPhone keyboard. 6 hours 32 across two parts. Transcript, part 1.
In June 2001 Forstall asked Don Melton to start a browser. Melton hired Kocienda and Williamson, and they built on Konqueror’s KHTML rather than Mozilla. Williamson gives the numbers: Mozilla was about a million and a half lines of code, KHTML about 150,000. “It was three guys and we figured 50,000 lines of code each.” Williamson says he got KHTML running on a Mac in a couple of days by convincing the code it was still on Linux.
Kocienda won an internal contest to design the iPhone keyboard. He describes the winning prototype as not one key per letter: keys were ganged together and software guessed the word from the letter buckets.
Part 2 covers secrecy, working with AT&T, the native-versus-web SDK decision, copy and paste in iOS 3, and Williamson on the Apple Maps launch and his departure from Apple afterwards.
Scott Forstall
Led iPhone software. 1 hour 3, interviewed by John Markoff in 2017.
Forstall on the origin of the multitouch push: Jobs came in on a Monday after a Microsoft executive had bragged to him about pen tablets, and “there was a set of expletives and then it was, ‘let’s show them how it’s really done!’”
The full event with the engineer panel is here; Forstall starts at 1:01:51.
Tony Fadell
Ran the iPod division and led hardware on the first three iPhones. 1 hour 18, interviewed by John Markoff in 2017.
For longer interviews with Fadell: Lenny’s Podcast, Lex Fridman, or Tim Ferriss
Panels
Steve Jobs in Exile, May 2026. 1 hour 12, with Dan’l Lewin, Bud Tribble and Avie Tevanian on stage and Rich Page contributing by recorded video.
Three NeXT founders in one room. It is filed under the title of the moderator’s book, which is why it is hard to find.
Apple at 50, 1 hour 38, with Sculley, Chris Espinosa and Ron Wayne on stage, Rubinstein and Tevanian by video. Steve Jobs Stories, 1 hour 34, which includes Sculley and Hertzfeld. The Churchill Club panel from five weeks after Jobs died, with Atkinson, Gassee, Hertzfeld, McKenna and Tesler.
Other tech history material?
If you know more of these, please share in the comments.
Some of my other favorites: Masters of Doom, David Kushner’s book on id Software; UNIX: A History and a Memoir, Brian Kernighan’s account of Bell Labs; and The Making of Prince of Persia, which is Jordan Mechner’s own journals from 1985 to 1993, published exactly as he wrote them at the time.