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 Caltech High Energy Physics group. In 1984 he moved east to join the Computing Science Research Center at Bell Laboratories, where he was the principle guru behind the Eighth, Ninth, and Tenth Editions of the Research UNIX system. In 1990, he bucked the Free Trade current by moving 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 jumped ship to the Department of Computer Science at York University, at the north pole of Metropolitan Toronto. A year and a half later he tired of the commute, and returned to U of T to run another heterogeneous computer zoo for the Canadian Institute for Theoretical Astrophysics. More recently he has done a little consulting, and since early 2004 he has been part-time consulting systems administrator and expert for two research groups in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Toronto.

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 discovered that the system's much lauded virtues of simplicity, modularity, consistent interfaces, and building powerful tools from simple, reusable pieces meshed very well with his own ideas of how to design and how to do work. 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, no matter how quixotic the pursuit.

Norman owns neither a tie nor an automobile; instead he has a house containing a cats, a collection of MicroVAXes and other obsolete computers, and hundreds of feet of thin Ethernet and Category 3 and 5 twisted pair wire. He has travelled more than 500,000 miles by passenger train, and hopes to resume long-distance bicycle touring some day.