Oh no, we have lost another giant! Very few people in the world know the gratitude she is owed. I doubt Nvidia and the other fabless companies would exist without her contribution. I met her through DARPA in 2018 [ref] and I later reached out for advice when I started a company in 2020. She was kind and generous with her time in all of our interactions. Beyond her technical prowess, she really understood people. The community/collabroation aprpach she used to launch the VLSI revolution in the 1970's are worth studying.
RIP
[ref] https://youtu.be/W_cB8VYunY8?si=9M9QVmBipbKUXxMR&t=1414
I met her totally at random at a bio conference in hawaii- I sat down next to her at a bar and we started chatting. I asked what she did and she said VLSI- something I knew nothing about (I was a biologist). She was curious about biology and wanted to learn about how she could help. I looked her name up later and learned she really did work in VLSI :)
I am actually part way through reading Mead & Conway's "Introduction to VLSI Systems" right now; I decided to go through it just for history's sake a few weeks ago. It's amazing to imagine that time period, it seemed like they were just creating so many new ideas so fast in a completely new realm; making the tools to build new processors to make the tools faster to make new processors faster... on and on and on. They published the book in 1978. We've been on that roller coaster ever since.
RIP.
I never heard of her before today, despite having been interested and educated, and employed in computer science for so long.
What a truly impressive list of achievements, and achieving such great things before, during and after transition gender in the 60s of all things.
I can't imagine what they would have done without being hampered by the social stigma and discrimination they must have faced.
It saddens me that I have only learned of her existence now, at her passing. RIP.
I worked for / with Lynn at Xerox PARC from 1980 - 1982. She will be missed.
Lynn was a real role model for me over the past 25 years. I'm sad that I never got to meet her, but her technical impact is everywhere.
One of the world's most inspiring people. I had the privilege of getting to know her to write a profile for a University of Michigan alumni magazine more than a decade ago: https://news.engin.umich.edu/2014/10/life-engineered/
She was and remains a huge inspiration to many of us. I remember peering over her pages of "Transgender Success Stories" which chronicled trans people who led lives with some measure of success in the 90s and early 2000s. When I came out to my parents as a EE student and trans woman myself, her story was the one resource I made them read. To no avail, mind you, my father called me brainwashed and told me the journey I was on was the "Con Way". I didn't listen and although I never lived up to her professional achievements, my transition was very successful.
Lynn Conway, co-author along with Carver Mead of "the textbook" on VLSI design, "Introduction to VLSI Systems", created and taught this historic VLSI Design Course in 1978, which was the first time students designed and fabricated their own integrated circuits:
>"Importantly, these werenât just any designs, for many pushed the envelope of system architecture. Jim Clark, for instance, prototyped the Geometry Engine and went on to launch Silicon Graphics Incorporated based on that work (see Fig. 16). Guy Steele, Gerry Sussman, Jack Holloway and Alan Bell created the follow-on âSchemeâ (a dialect of LISP) microprocessor, another stunning design."
Many more links and beautiful illustrations of her student's VLSI designs:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31758139
Also, Jim Clark (SGI, Netscape) was one of Lynn Conway's students, and she taught him how to make his first prototype "Geometry Engine"!
http://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/conway/VLSI/MPCAdv/MPCAdv.ht...
Just 29 days after the design deadline time at the end of the courses, packaged custom wire-bonded chips were shipped back to all the MPC79 designers. Many of these worked as planned, and the overall activity was a great success. I'll now project photos of several interesting MPC79 projects. First is one of the multiproject chips produced by students and faculty researchers at Stanford University (Fig. 5). Among these is the first prototype of the "Geometry Engine", a high performance computer graphics image-generation system, designed by Jim Clark. That project has since evolved into a very interesting architectural exploration and development project.[9]
Figure 5. Photo of MPC79 Die-Type BK (containing projects from Stanford University):
http://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/conway/VLSI/MPCAdv/SU-BK1.jp...
[...]
The text itself passed through drafts, became a manuscript, went on to become a published text. Design environments evolved from primitive CIF editors and CIF plotting software on to include all sorts of advanced symbolic layout generators and analysis aids. Some new architectural paradigms have begun to similarly evolve. An example is the series of designs produced by the OM project here at Caltech. At MIT there has been the work on evolving the LISP microprocessors [3,10]. At Stanford, Jim Clark's prototype geometry engine, done as a project for MPC79, has gone on to become the basis of a very powerful graphics processing system architecture [9], involving a later iteration of his prototype plus new work by Marc Hannah on an image memory processor [20].
[...]
For example, the early circuit extractor work done by Clark Baker [16] at MIT became very widely known because Clark made access to the program available to a number of people in the network community. From Clark's viewpoint, this further tested the program and validated the concepts involved. But Clark's use of the network made many, many people aware of what the concept was about. The extractor proved so useful that knowledge about it propagated very rapidly through the community. (Another factor may have been the clever and often bizarre error-messages that Clark's program generated when it found an error in a user's design!)
9. J. Clark, "A VLSI Geometry Processor for Graphics", Computer, Vol. 13, No. 7, July, 1980.
Lynn Conway, Dynamic Instruction Scheduling
https://web.archive.org/web/20150814232249/https://ai.eecs.u...
This report was issued February 23, 1966 which was close to a year before Tomasulo's An Efficient Algorithm for Exploiting Multiple Arithmetic Units.
I'd never heard of this report before today. It isn't taught in Berkeley's CS152/252. It's not mentioned in Hennessy and Patterson's books.
A woman of incredible courage - to be able to rebuild her career after being kicked out of IBM despite her achievements, is inspirational. And, given how even the implementation of superscalar processors confuses me, smarter than Iâll ever be for understanding that AND chip fabbing at the same time, one of humanityâs finest technical achievements.
> When nearing retirement, Conway learned that the story of her early work at IBM might soon be revealed through the investigations of Mark Smotherman that were being prepared for a 2001 publication
That kind of makes it sound like Smotherman was poking around trying to find Conway's secrets. What was actually happening is that he was trying to research an early IBM supercomputer project, but was not having much luck. There was very little published information, and IBM had apparently lost its records. Smotherman asked on the net for help and Conway responded and gave him a massive amount of information.
Here's an article that provides more information [1]. Here's the first few paragraphs:
> Late in 1998, a young researcher delving into the secret history of a 30-year-old supercomputer project at IBM published an appeal for help. As Mark Smotherman explained in an Internet posting, he knew that the project had pioneered several supercomputing technologies. But beyond that, the trail was cold. IBM itself appeared to have lost all record of the work, as if having experienced a corporate lobotomy. Published details were sketchy and its chronology full of holes. He had been unable to find anyone with full knowledge of what had once been called âProject Y.â
> Within a few days, a cryptic e-mail arrived at Smothermanâs Clemson University office in South Carolina. The sender was Lynn Conway, one of the most distinguished American women in computer science. She seemed not only to know the entire history of Project Y, but to possess reams of material about it.
> Over the next few weeks, Conway helped Smotherman fill in many of the gaps, but her knowledge presented him with another mystery: How did she know? There was no mention of her name in any of the team rosters. Nor was any association with IBM mentioned in her published resume or in the numerous articles about her in technical journals. When he probed, she would reply only that she had worked at the company under a different name--and her tone made it clear there was no point in asking further.
> What Smotherman could not know was that his appeal for strictly technical information had presented Lynn Conway with a deeply personal dilemma. She was eager for the story of IBMâs project to emerge and for her own role in the work to be celebrated, not suppressed. But she knew that could not happen without opening a door on her past she had kept locked for more than 30 years.
> Only after agonizing for weeks did Conway telephone Smotherman and unburden herself of an extraordinary story.
> âYou see,â she began, âwhen I was at IBM, I was a boy.â
[1] https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2000-nov-19-tm-54188...
I recommend reading Lynn's story, written in her own words:
https://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/conway/RetrospectiveT.html
It is amazing, tragic, and triumphant in so many ways.
> She worked at IBM in the 1960s and invented generalized dynamic instruction handling, a key advance used in out-of-order execution, used by most modern computer processors to improve performance.
I only found out about her a few weeks ago, when I was trying to understand that recent GhostRace exploit. It uses out-of-order execution, which led me to her. There's a fun little cartoon about her somewhere on YouTube, but I can't find it.
Sad that she's now gone!
Great prof. Changed my entire career arc. RIP.
This appears to the the source Wikipedia is citing - http://www.myhusbandbetty.com/wordPressNEW/2024/06/11/lynn-c...
May she rest in peace, her achievements and contributions to the field of computing are unfortunately unknown to those outside of the field - but impacted so much more than just computing.
> Although she had hoped to be allowed to transition on the job, IBM fired Conway in 1968 after she revealed her intention to transition.[19] IBM apologized for this in 2020.
Given that in 2012 there was an entire IEEE magazine issue dedicated to her career and contributions to the field which really brought awareness of all her contributions...it's disappointing it took IBM so long to apologize, especially given they outed her circa ~2000.
What a terribly difficult life and yet with so many great achievements. An inspiration!
I'm ashamed to say I did not know about this person before today; what an interesting life she led.
A true giant both for industry and people.
Shame on all of "us" for missing the date.
We covered VLSI design as part of Comp. Sci at Bristol, UK c.1980, based on Conway & Mead's "Introduction to VLSI systems".
Comp. Sci was mostly software, but we also did some 7400 series TTL bread boarding in the lab - building things like traffic-light LED sequencers based on DIY flip flops made out of NAND gates.
VLSI design was a revelation - that there was a different way to designing things than out of TTL "lego bricks", and that you could go full custom instead !
I was never aware of Lynn Conway's personal transgender challenges - more power to her for having had such an amazing career and impact while dealing with this.
How life plays things out...
I was told earlier today that my best friend in this world has died. We haven't talked for the past 4-5 days (we usually catch up on the weekends - but this past weekend he had a packed concert-going-schedule - we live in different countries so I couldn't join).
What sucks the most is that we use(d) Signal, and we have autodestruct every 2 days so apart from some really old emails, I got nothing left from him, and our frequent "correspondence".
I am using the "Henry Bemis" moniker because he was making fun of me and my reading and I was making fun of him and his frequent cinema-going (and we both loved THAT episode of the Twilight Zone - Time enough at last)(great episode btw!!)
And now I got into HN and I saw the black banner on top and I thought "WTF is going on today with the deaths!" and my stomach got a bit tighter.
It sucks when people we love die. It's what Keanu said to Colbert "those who love us will miss us".
My friend also "..would like to live five lives in the course of one life", but alas, he managed to live half of it.
Farewell to those who fade/reincarnate/cross the river Styx/go to hell/go to paradise.. we will miss them.
I don't maintain a blog, so I'll be keeping this bookmarked. Apologies for the 'spam', I wanted to get this out of my system.
Anyway, sorry to hear Lynn Conway has died, looked technology just lost a great contributor.
lots of progress in transgender issues since then because of people like lynn conway. Because of people like her, fewer people will lose their careers (or have to rebuild) or kids just because they corrected their gender.
What an absolute genius. RIP, Lynn.
How touching to read so many appreciative comments A life well spent RIP Lynn, may the earth be light on you
Since many are focusing on the transgender aspect, I'll mention this thoughtful article (the trans argument starts in section V). It's been years since I first came across it, but it really affected my thinking on trans people.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-ma...
Her life sounds like an interesting one (in good and bad ways). I would like to read a biography, or even see a biographical or dramatized film about it.
IBM did apologize to her: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynn_Conway#IBM's_apology
86 years old! She had a great life.
She spoke at my commencement a few years back. Her story is an interesting one
Great loss for our community.
"...Lynn was recently awarded the rare IBM Lifetime Achievement Award, given to individuals who have changed the world through technology inventions."
After the way they treated her, I wouldn't accept it.
Thank you for the inspiration as I continue my gender transition. I appreciate your struggles and dedication to living a life that was "for you" and not for anyone else. RIP.
Very sad. Do we know how she passed?
n the 1980's, Lynn Conway gave one of the two best talks I've heard in my life. She used sociology to understand how to spread radical ideas, starting with the example of birds in England teaching each other how to poke the foil in milk deliveries, to drink the cream. She applied this to teaching a revolutionary approach to VSLI chip design, in schools across the country.
I had no idea she was trans. When I figured this out, it became part of my spiel to students: If being different doesn't destroy you, it'll make you stronger. It's not simply that one can be just as good a scientist while being gay, for example. No, we live in a country so stupid it may reelect Trump, and there are still issues with being different. If the experience can teach you that many people are crippled by convention and full of shit, that revelation can liberate you to do more original work.
R.I.P.
James Conway.
I know it was already suggested in previous comments, but I do not see the black bar? Was it removed already?
RIP. A great reminder that great achievers tend to be idiosyncratic people, not necessarily "by the book, SAT 1600, GPA 4.0, Ivy League Plus" people.
We should all be thankful for her contributions and for those who preceded her who were similarly "abnormal" by the standards of their time.
If this is verified, I think a black band is 100% warranted. As I understand it, she was a real innovator in VLSI, which I think we all agree is somewhat important :)
EDIT: GG, the black band appeared as I sent this
[dead]
Is there a citation for this, or an announcement somewhere? The Wikipedia page was changed, but with no link backing it up, and I can't find any.
EDIT: ah, found it: http://www.myhusbandbetty.com/wordPressNEW/2024/06/11/lynn-c...
RIP.
Why does Wikipedia not list the first spouse or children?
RIP, Lynn Conway.
For those had a doubt like me, it is different Conway than another computer scientist,John Horton Conway (26 December 1937 â 11 April 2020) famous for "Conway's Game of Life".
For those of you who are inclined to say "HackerNews doesn't deal with politics", I hope that Lynn's story reminds you that any work you do is intertwined with politics. While I appreciate that it's a difficult line to walk, to have productive and relevant political discussion in a forum like this, politics and social acceptance are a part of every aspect of our lives. Brilliant, kind, impactful people are kept from leading the life they want to lead every day because of societal intolerance for who they are. Incredible people like Lynn who have overcome that intolerance to lead a remarkable life should remind everyone of the suffering that others go through. There are uncountable other people who are not allowed to be themselves and who are suffocated in our society, with the lives of transgender people often ending in ostracisation or murder. One of the remarkable things about technology is that it enables trodden people to escape this tyranny to an extent once impossible. It enables marginalized people to be themselves in our world. Let us continue to enable that.
Such "political" discussions and the impact technology has on them are an important part of the discourse here. I'm sad she is gone but I'm glad to see that this post is high up the front page. If you're inclined to denigrate transgender people, I encourage you to consider that they are trying to lead an honest life. I encourage you to consider what you're taking away from them and from the world by dehumanizing them. No matter why they are who they are.
[dupe]
[dead]
[dead]
Not to be mistaken with John Conway, known for Conwayâs game of life.
i have some questions. if an academia transitions after their graduation, what would be written in the papers? the deadname or the current name? or one can ask the authoritative institution to issue new papers with the current name on it? also, what would happen to their publication? i genuinely have never thought of it before.
Why does the Wiki page say "citation needed" for calling her a "computer scientist, electrical engineer"?
[dead]
Is it an impression , or are computer people overly represented amongst trans people ?
Maybe working with computers provides a better environment for people with social-related issues ?
Let this thread be a lesson that no matter how nice you are and no matter your achievements, as long as you are trans you can't even die in peace.
[flagged]
[flagged]
Did Conway's Law originate with Lynn Conway?
[flagged]
[flagged]
[dead]
#1 Most Talented Female Engineer
[dead]
[flagged]
[dead]
[flagged]
[flagged]
[flagged]
I hope that at some point she could reconnect with her kids from her prior marriage.
Lynn Conway co-wrote "the book" on VLSI design, "Introduction to VLSI Systems", created and taught this historic VLSI Design Course in 1978, which was the first time students designed and fabricated their own integrated circuits, including James Clark (SGI) who made the Geometry Engine, and Guy L Steel (MIT) who made the Scheme Microprocessor.
She invented superscalar architecture at IBM, just to be fired in 1968 after she revealed her intention to transition, then 52 years later IBM formally apologized to her in 2020. She successfully rebooted her life, invented and taught VLSI design to industry pioneers who founded many successful companies based on the design methodology she invented, wrote the book on, and personally taught to them, and then she became a trans activist who helped many people transition, find each other, and avoid suicide, fight abuse and bigotry, and find acceptance, by telling her story and building an online community.
Lynn Conway receives 2009 IEEE Computer Society Computer Pioneer Award:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i4Txvjia3p0