Quote:Who was Lynn Conway?

Born in White Plains, New York in 1938 , Lynn Conway’s early life was defined by crippling gender dysphoria, which she began experiencing at a young age.

She entered MIT in 1955 but ultimately dropped out over her attempt to transition between 1957-58, which was incredibly difficult due to the hostile anti-LGBTQ+ climate of the 1950s.

After living in San Francisco for several years, she enrolled at Columbia University in 1961, where she received a bachelor’s and master’s degree in electrical engineering after graduating two years later.

Conway was eventually recruited by IBM in Menlo Park California – eventually dubbed Silicon Valley – to work on various projects, including what would become the world’s fastest supercomputer at the time.

Things became sour, however, after she attempted to transition following a consultation with pioneering gender-affirming care researcher Harry Benjamin, who revolutionised trans-healthcare in the 1960s.

Despite initially being supportive of Conway’s transition, even changing her name on company records, IBM eventually made the decision to fire her based on her gender identity alone.

On the decision by IBM, Conway told the LA Times in 2020 that she was nonjudgmental about having been let go.

Far be it from being discouraged from the hiccup, Conway eventually made her way back into the computer engineering industry, completely obscuring her identity and past as a way to work in the field without judgement.

By the 1970s, Conway had quickly climbed the ranks across computer engineering and was eventually recruited by Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) in 1973.

There, she made some of her biggest contributions to microchip design and research, worked with MIT graduates on co-authoring a book on revolutionary processing research, and taught an experimental course on Very Large Scale Integrated chip design (VSLI).

With her contributions to the field continuing up to and into the 1980s, she was recruited by the Department of Defense as an assistant director for strategic computing, where she spearheaded research into machine intelligence technology.

She eventually settled into an academia job as professor emerita of electrical engineering a computer science at the University of Michigan, where she stayed until retiring in 1999.

Quote:“Chips used to be designed by drawing them with paper and pencil like an architect’s blueprints in the pre-digital era,” Bertacco wrote. “Conway’s work developed algorithms that enabled our field to use software to arrange millions, and later billions, of transistors on a chip.”

Quote:As sociologist Thomas Streeter discusses in The Net Effect when commenting on Conway's DARPA job:

"By taking this job, Conway was demonstrating that she was no antiwar liberal. (In response to critics, she has said, 'if you have to fight, and sometimes you must in order to deal with bad people, history tells us that it really helps to have the best weapons available'). But Conway carried a sense of computers as tools for horizontal communications that she had absorbed at PARC right into DARPA – at one of the hottest moments of the cold war."