Years After Maya Lin's Basement, Tech Guru Norton Buys Penthouse

Ten years ago, the architect Maya Lin redesigned an apartment for the 1980s software magnate Peter Norton that was so modest--half underground, and not that big--that Architectural Digest called it "quirky, if not awkward." When a Brazilian banker bought the place and redid it, an Interior Design piece on his renovations was called "Let There Be Light."

Mr. Norton's new Manhattan apartment is bigger and brighter, a better fit for the man whose cocky pose on the cover of his eponymous computer programming guides and fix-it software products became an icon of '80s computing. According to city records filed yesterday, he paid $6.8 million for a penthouse at The Greenwich on West 13th Street, where the newer-wave tech entrepreneur Joshua Abramson recently got a condo too.

The penthouse, according to the listing, has a 1,095-square-foot terrace (plus a 10.5-foot-wide solarium, not to mention 23 windows), along with three bedrooms and a library.

More on the apartment, including the buyer, is in tomorrow's Observer.