Norman Wilson's interest in how computers work
began with the
Bell Labs Cardiac
cardboard computer
he owned in the early 1970s.
While studying physics at Caltech,
he spent too much time programming
and helping to run the university's
PDP-10.
In 1980,
he succumbed to the inevitable,
and took a job as systems programmer and system manager
for the UNIX systems
in the Caltech High Energy Physics group.
In 1984
he moved east
to join the Computing Science Research Center
at Bell Laboratories,
where he became oen of the principal gurus behind the
Eighth,
Ninth,
and Tenth Editions
of the Research UNIX system.
In 1990,
bucking the Free Trade current,
he moved to Canada
and joining the
University of Toronto,
where he ran UNIX systems from
Digital,
Sun,
SGI,
Cray,
and Kendall Square,
and worked on computer security
and on distributed network computing.
In 1997
he headed further north
to the
Department of Computer Science
at York University
(SGI, Sun, and a little IA32 Linux).
Tiring of the commute,
he returned to U of T
a year and a half later
to run another heterogeneous computer zoo
(SGI, Sun, DEC Alpha running Digital UNIX and Linux,
and IA32 with Linux)
for the
Canadian Institute for Theoretical Astrophysics.
More recently he did a little consulting,
and
worked part-time
for research groups in
the
Department of Computer Science
and the
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering.
He is now a full-time system administrator
for
teach.cs,
supporting instructional computing
in the Department of Computer Science.
Norman cut his computing teeth on Altair BASIC and assembler, and later on DEC TOPS-10 and VAX/VMS. He was first exposed to UNIX in the Caltech HEP group, and quickly fell in love with that system's much-lauded simplicity, modularity, consistent interfaces, and powerful tools built from simple, reusable pieces. He has never really recovered from the discovery that in commonly available UNIX and UNIX-clone systems, and to some extent even in the original Research system, these virtues are honoured more often in the breach than in the observance; he continues to promote them, quixotic as the pursuit may be.
Norman owns neither a tie nor an automobile. He co-owns a house containing cats; computers ranging from elderly MicroVAXes to reasonably-current Intel and AMD systems, some mounted in a 19-inch rack in his basement; and hundreds of feet of Category 3 and 5 twisted pair wire. He has travelled more than a million kilometers by passenger train, and hopes someday to resume long-distance bicycle touring.