My #CompSci lecturers often dropped the names of inventors. But only if they were men. We talked about Gordon Moore, obviously Turing :rainbow-flag: was mentioned, about Don Knuth, about Chomsky etc.
But when we discussed the #ARM architecture, we never talked about the inventor Sophie Wilson. We also never talked about Mary Ann Horton, despite her work on
viandterminfo– but of course we mentioned Bill Joy. We discussed the Spanning Tree Protocol, but not its inventor Radia Perlman. We have the whole field of #SoftwareEngineering, but who coined the term? Margaret Hamilton. We mentioned the ENIAC and v. Neumann, but failed to talk about Adele Goldstine. We discussed the origins of #OOP and #Smalltalk but ignored Adele Goldberg. We programmed in #Assembly but never talked about the woman who wrote the first #Assembler, Kathleen Booth. And don’t get me started on #Safari and our sweet @lisamelton <3 Or any of the (incomplete list) of Ida Rhodes, Carol Shaw, Shafi Goldwasser, Edith Clarke, Annie Easley, Joyce Little, …And today? Let’s talk about our favorite trans woman CPU designer, Lynn Conway.
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Lynn developed “generalized dynamic instruction dispatch” for IBM in 1966. 2 years later she was kicked out, just after Robert Tomasulo published the “Tomasulo Algorithm” for out-of-order execution of floating point instructions, utilizing Lynn’s work. Everyone knows Tomasulo (and he did great work, mind you!), but no-one knows Lynn.
Later, in technical compsci, you may stumble upon highly integrated circuits, everyone there knows #VLSI, but not the inventor, our dear Dr. Conway.
Her story, her struggle against IBM who took decades to apologize to her for her mistreatment. She transitioned in darker times and pioneered not “only” in compsci. She was what many would call “greater than life”. She died a few days ago.
Today, let’s remember Lynn , tomorrow we’ll fight on
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