Oral History of Bertrand Serlet

Interviewed by Hansen Hsu on 2023-09-20 in Mountain View, CA
© Computer History Museum

Bertrand Serlet was born in 1960 near Paris, France, but spent his early childhood in a village in the Alps, and later in Normandy. His first experiences with computers was a mechanical computing toy at age 10 and mainframe computers in middle and high school. For college, Serlet went to Rouen for college preparatory classes and then onto École Nationale Supérieure near Paris, where he initially studied mathematics. Serlet decided to switch from mathematics to computers after taking a VLSI design course from Jean Vuillemin, with whom he would go on to do his Ph.D. from the University of Orsay. Vuillemin was also at the French research institute INRIA, where Serlet would continue on as a researcher, working alongside Jean-Marie Hullot.

Serlet joined Xerox PARC’s Computer Science Laboratory in 1984, working in the Cedar/Mesa programming language and development environment, still creating design tools for VLSI, developing the multiprocessor Dragon machine. In 1989, Serlet followed Hullot to Steve Jobs’ NeXT Computer. At NeXT, Serlet worked with Hullot on the AppKit team, releasing OpenStep, the update to the NeXTSTEP operating system. With Hullot and Lee Boynton, Serlet wrote a new version of the Workspace Manager, the equivalent to the Macintosh’s Finder desktop environment. After spending a year working remotely in France, Serlet moved back to California and became a manager at NeXT, leading the effort to create the Foundation framework, factoring out fundamental data structures from the user interface-focused AppKit framework for the next release of OpenStep. Serlet’s group would go on to work on Enterprise Objects Framework (EOF) and WebObjects until NeXT’s acquisition by Apple in 1997.

At Apple, Serlet led the development of Rhapsody, which became Mac OS X. During the following years, Serlet would lead the development of OS X, ultimately becoming Executive Vice President of Software after Avie Tevanian, all the way through the beginnings of 10.7 Lion. Serlet also worked closely with Scott Forstall, who was instrumental in the development of the Carbon framework and the Aqua interface for OS X, and ultimately led the iPhone/iOS software development team, which was derived from OS X. Serlet would leave Apple in 2011 after recruiting Craig Federighi to replace him, and would go on to found startups involved with the cloud and silicon.

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Collection number: 102808913
Acquisition number: 2023.0158