William Newman obituary

A pioneer in computer graphics and human-computer interaction, my friend William Newman, who has died aged 80, was, during the 1970s, a member of the team at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) in California that conceived and developed the kind of personal computers and local networks that people use today.

He refined and demonstrated the advantages of the "frame buffer" graphics display technology that is now operated universally, developing, in 1975, one of the first interactive programs for producing illustrations and drawings. He went on to help and inspire many others in the field of computer graphics and graphical interaction through the publication of the first textbook on the subject, Principles of Interactive Computer Graphics (1973), which he co-wrote with Robert Sproull.