William Newman (computer scientist)
| William Newman | |
|---|---|
 |
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| Born |
21 May 1939 Comberton, near Cambridge, England |
| Residence | Cambridge, England |
| Nationality | United Kingdom |
| Occupation | Computer scientist |
| Known for | Contributions to computer graphics. Participation in work at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center in the 1970s that led to the emergence of the personal computer. |
William Maxwell Newman (born 21 May 1939) is a British computer scientist. With others at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center in the 1970s Newman demonstrated the advantages of the raster (bitmap graphics) display technology first deployed in the Xerox Alto personal workstation, developing interactive programs for producing illustrations and drawings. With Bob Sproull he co-authored the first major textbook on interactive computer graphics. Newman later contributed to the field of human–computer interaction, publishing several papers and a book taking an engineering approach to the design of interactive systems. He is an honorary professor at University College London and became an ACM SIGCHI Academy member in 2004.
Newman was born 21 May 1939 at Comberton, near Cambridge, England. He is the second son of Max Newman, the distinguished mathematician and World War II codebreaker who worked at Bletchley Park, Manchester University and Cambridge University. William's mother was Lyn Irvine, a writer linked with the Bloomsbury Group. For many years William was unaware of his father's important work at the Bletchley Park WWII codebreaking centre because it was protected under the Official Secrets Act until at least in the mid-1970s. However, in later life he took a keen interest in his father's role there, contributing items to the Bletchley Park Museum and elsewhere.
He attended Manchester Grammar School before studying Engineering at St. John's College, Cambridge, obtaining a BA with first-class honours in 1961. His first contact with computers came in the mid-1960s when he joined others developing early CAD applications on the PDP-7 computer installed at the Cambridge Computer Laboratory. This PDP-7 was one of the first computers in the United Kingdom equipped with a vector-graphics display.
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