Norm was a student at Brown, then a researcher in Computer Science, then helped raise $15M to put personal computers on campus in 1984, and then was co-founder of Brown's Institute for Research in Information and Scholarship (IRIS), which developed the Intermedia hypertext system. He later went on to do more multimedia, overseeing products at Macromedia, which produced early Internet software such as Shockwave, Dreamweaver, and Flash.