home what & why overview publications (w/descriptions) projects (incomplete) Sidebars (not yet)
The structure of the website resembles that of a LinkedIn profile, because that's what I started to write. But I soon found I preferred to tell the story without imposed constraints.
Currently, besides this page, the website contains a career overview giving a capsule history of my work. There's also a publications page listing and describing refereed, published papers (not many). Most papers are represented by a detailed summary, usually including technical background information, as well as a link to the full pdf.
Also, there is an as-yet-incomplete projects page. It currently covers projects up to c. 1975. These projects are not represented on the publications page, not least because I never tried to publish anything before 1980. The project descriptions contain what might be considered an unconventional mixture of organizational, technical, and personal information, but, hopefully, the combination serves to tell the story of what a project was about and my role in it. The technical aspects of the material are intended to be understood by people with some background in computing, but not necessarily in the particular subject.
Finally there is a planned “sidebars” section for material less suited to the other pages, such as non-technical stories.
(Note: the patents generally are not discussed on this site. They can be found on the US patents website. See the USPTO quick search facility, using "Newman, Paula S." as the "Inventor Name".)
Some of it is vanity; I did accomplish some things and I occasionally want people to know about them.
But the more justifiable motivation is historical. The development of computer technology in the second half of the 20th century is a significant part of recent human history. It laid the foundation for the very different way that people at the beginning of the 21st century live and work. And individual accounts can help to preserve that history. How?
First, histories of a computing subfield, in trying to maximize understanding of the concepts involved, can make the sequence of developments look like a logical progression of ideas, when things were almost always much messier. Also, broader histories of computing, for example of developments during a period, or by a corporation, can obscure things in another way, by the necessary selectivity. Both kinds of accounts lead to notions like "X invented Y", when actually there were often many X's working towards Y-like-things at the same time.
To counter this, especially with respect to years when the field was relatively small (perhaps from mid-1950s through about 1980), anyone involved probably participated, in some way, in significant technical developments, and can contribute to a more adequate picture.
Personal accounts also provide correctives in another way. To explain. In the last decade or so I’ve become aware that some bad computer history is being written. Most of it is inadvertent. People trying to tell the story of a technical area sometimes throw in impressionistic, unresearched background information.
And inadvertent errors can occur even in first-person accounts, especially with respect to context. For example, I generally found that my recollections about my own work corresponded closely (but sometimes not exactly) with documentary evidence stored in my garage. However, particularly for the earlier years, more effort was needed to properly situate the work, both in terms of larger containing projects and in terms of other related technical work. For this, both the "garage" evidence and broader research were needed.
Inaccurate recollections and insufficient checking probably account for most errors in personal or other histories. But some widely publicized, erroneous accounts seem more sinister . . . In either case the problems can be limited by additional personal accounts.