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The baseball world lost Willie Mays this week, and Hollywood lost Donald Sutherland. Getting slightly less attention, but undoubtedly on the radars of many readers of this site, was the passing of computer scientist Lynn Conway. She actually died on June 9, of a heart ailment, but it took a few days for the news to propagate.
Born and raised in the New York City suburbs, Conway took a B.S. and a Master's degree at Columbia, graduating with the latter degree in 1963. She was recruited and hired by IBM; during her time with the company, she invented generalized dynamic instruction handling. We don't want this item to get too tech-y, especially since it's the historian who is writing this and not the computer scientist. However, that innovation speeds up computers because it allows them to process instructions based on what is the best match for available resources, rather than having to process them in the order they are given. This helped speed up the supercomputer IBM was developing significantly. Nonetheless, the company fired Conway. We'll get into the reason later; for now, here are a couple of pictures. The one on the left was taken a few years after Conway's IBM stint, the one on the right was from about 20 years ago:
After being dumped by IBM, Conway worked at a few low-level jobs, before catching on at the legendary Xerox PARC laboratory. Even historians know that is where the first computer GUI (graphical user interface) was invented. If you think it's easier to delete a document by dragging a picture of a piece of paper to a picture of a trash can, as opposed to typing something like rm -i d.txt, then you can thank Xerox PARC.
Conway did not work on the GUI, but she did work with Caltech professor Carver Mead on very-large-scale integration (VLSI) chip design. Again, without getting too tech-y, this made it possible to fit a lot more stuff on the surfaces of microchips, making them faster and more efficient. Mead and Conway also wrote a book about VLSI, which became the standard for years and years (after all, they invented the thing). The Votemaster once went to a seminar on VLSI that was based on the book, and afterwards there was a banquet at a medieval castle with pseudo-medieval food. The servers said to everyone: "Would you like some mead?" And the attendees answered: "No thank you, I have had quite enough Mead for one day." The servers did not get the joke, of course. Nonetheless, the work that Conway and Mead did was a big enough deal that it's known as the Mead-Conway VLSI chip design revolution.
The work Conway and Mead did was in the 1970s. And so, the broad presumption was that Mead, being male, was the real brains behind the project. Conway grew so annoyed that she eventually wrote an essay describing what she called the "Conway Effect"—that the scientific innovations produced by women or people of color are usually attributed to whatever white man was in closest proximity. She observed in the essay:
In 2009, my disappearance was complete after the Computer History Museum's gala celebration of the 50th anniversary of the integrated circuit. Sixteen men were described by the media as "the Valley's founding fathers." They were inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame for their contributions to microelectronics. Top billing went to Gordon Moore and Carver Mead. I was not invited to the event, and didn't even know it was happening.
Mead did not encourage the perception that VLSI was primarily his but, obviously, neither did he discourage it.
After leaving Xerox PARC in the 1980s, Conway was a key player at DARPA (v1.0 of the Internet) in the 1980s, and then she became a professor at the University of Michigan. She was there for close to 20 years, and was nearing retirement age when circumstances opened a rather different chapter in her public career. A book on the IBM supercomputer, and Conway's work on it, was scheduled to be published in early 2001. And the book was going to include details that made clear exactly why the company had fired Conway.
This being the case, Conway felt she had no choice but to get out ahead of the story. She first told close friends, then colleagues, and then eventually the world at large. The reason for her termination is that when Conway started at IBM, she was outwardly a man. Growing up, she had always felt like a girl trapped in a boy's body, but she had no idea what to do with that information. It was not until physician Harry Benjamin published his textbook The Transsexual Phenomenon that Lynn Conway understood what was going on. With Benjamin's help, Conway began medical treatments in 1967, and became one of the first Americans to undergo hormonal replacement and surgical sex reassignment. IBM disapproved strongly and terminated her. When Conway resumed her career, she told nobody about her earlier identity, operating instead in what she called "stealth mode."
Once Conway was outed, she became an activist for trans equality. She pushed back at theories of sexual identity that she found misguided and degrading. She was a cast member in the first all-trans performance of The Vagina Monologues. She was named one of the "Stonewall 40 trans heroes" on the 40th anniversary of the Stonewall riots. She successfully lobbied for the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers' code of ethics to be LGBT inclusive. She was the subject of Lines in the Sand: The Lynn Conway Story, a graphic novel that tells the story of her life. In an interview near the end of her life, Conway remarked: "From the 1970s to 1999 I was recognized as breaking the gender barrier in the computer science field as a woman, but in 2000 it became the transgender barrier I was breaking."
Times change, of course, and some of the wrongs of the past have been righted. She is now broadly recognized as a trailblazer in the field of computer science. The Computer Museum eventually added Conway's name alongside Mead's. And IBM, more than half a century after firing Conway, formally apologized. "We deeply regret what you went through, and I know I speak for all of us," Diane Gherson, senior vice president of human resources, told Conway.
Earlier this week, we wrote an item in which we observed that when Title IX was adopted by Congress in 1972, trans Americans were virtually unknown. This seemed like a good real-world story that serves to illustrate that point and explain why that was the case. That Conway was a trailblazing computer scientist, feminist and trans activist is a bonus. If that's not a life well-lived, we don't know what is.
Have a good weekend, all! (Z)