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Oral History of Steve Naroff Part 1, Session 1

Computer History MuseumCited 3× on HN, 2020–2024
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interview · intermediate · evergreen · 2020–2024 on HN

Computer History Museum oral history of Steve Naroff, an engineer at Stepstone, NeXT and Apple who worked on Objective-C. This first session covers his childhood, music background and early career.

Pointed to as a primary-source account of Objective-C's origins and the early days of NeXT and Apple.

3 comments from Hacker News

@Austin_Conlon2024-11 · in “Steve Jobs, NeXTSTEP, and early object-oriented programming (2016)”

Related: - Oral History of Blaine Garst [PDF]: link - Oral History of Blaine Garst [Video]: link - Oral History of Steve Naroff [PDF]: link - Oral History of Steve Naroff [Video]: ▶ this video

@nequo2024-08 · in “1991 WWW-NeXT Implementation”

Yes. The Computer History Museum has a two part interview with Steve Naroff, one of the engineers who worked on Objective C: ▶ this video link

@cxr2020-06 · in “Design Principles Behind Smalltalk (1981)”

At the risk of putting readers off by the title, there's a video essay on YouTube called "Object-Oriented Programming is Bad"[1]. It's both thoughtful and thought-provoking, although I don't agree with the conclusion. Steve Naroff (from Stepstone/NeXT/Apple) did a recent-ish set of interviews with the Computer History Museum[2][3] and referenced that video a bit (and extemporized about objects in small parts throughout). Side note: Naroff and Brad Cox are set to present a paper on Objective-C at this year's HOPL[4]. I wish it were as readily available as Allen Wirfs-Brock's JS paper for the same conference[5][6]. 1. link 2. ▶ this video 3. link 4. link 5. link 6. link