Shapiro spent the summer of 1954 at Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill, New Jersey where, in collaboration with Karel de Leeuw, Ed Moore, and Claude Shannon, he investigated the question of whether providing a Turing machine augmented with an oracle machine producing an infinite sequence of random events (like the tosses of a fair coin) would enable the machine to output a non-computable sequence.
In 1955, as a Princeton PhD student, Shapiro coined the phrase "strong reducibility" for a computability theory currently called the many-one reduction.
In the late 1960s and early 1970s Shapiro was the lead designer of one of the first computer-based mapping and cartography systems.
[3] MH was the first mail system to utilize Unix design principles by using shell commands to manipulate messages as individual files.
In 1972, Norman Z. Shapiro was a creative lead in his essays on e-mail etiquette, introducing concepts that were rarely considered until over 15 years later.
That represented regional or global crisis and war with agents optionally substituting for human teams in making high-level decisions.