Lynn Conway Inventions Information

Lynn Ann Conway (born January 2, 1938) is an American computer scientist, electrical engineer, inventor, and transgender activist.

Conway is notable for a number of pioneering achievements, including the Mead and Conway revolution in VLSI design, which incubated an emerging electronic design automation industry. She worked at IBM in the 1960s and is credited with the invention of generalized dynamic instruction handling, a key advance used in out-of-order execution, used by most modern computer processors to improve performance.

Conway grew up in White Plains, New York. Conway was shy and experienced gender dysphoria as a child. She became fascinated and engaged by astronomy (building a 6-inch (150 mm) reflector telescope one summer) and did well in math and science in high school. Conway entered MIT in 1955, earning high grades but ultimately leaving in despair after an attempted gender transition in 1957–58 failed due to the medical climate at the time. After working as an electronics technician for several years, Conway resumed education at Columbia University's School of Engineering and Applied Science, earning B.S. and M.S.E.E. degrees in 1962 and 1963.

Conway was recruited by IBM Research in Yorktown Heights, New York in 1964, and was soon selected to join the architecture team designing an advanced supercomputer, working alongside John Cocke, Herbert Schorr, Ed Sussenguth, Fran Allen and other IBM researchers on the Advanced Computing Systems (ACS) project, inventing multiple-issue out-of-order dynamic instruction scheduling while working there. The Computer History Museum has stated that "the ACS machines appears to have been the first superscalar design, a computer architectural paradigm widely exploited in modern high-performance microprocessors."

After learning of the pioneering research of Harry Benjamin in treating transsexuals and realising that genital affirmation surgery was now possible, Conway sought his help and became his patient. After suffering from severe depression from gender dysphoria, Conway contacted Benjamin, who agreed to provide counseling and prescribe hormones. Under Benjamin's care, Conway began her medical gender transition.

While struggling with life in a male role, Conway had been married to a woman and had two children. Under the legal constraints then in place, after transitioning she was denied access to their children.

Although she had hoped to be allowed to transition on the job, IBM fired Conway in 1968 after she revealed her intention to transition to a female gender role.

Upon completing her transition in 1968, Conway took a new name and identity, and restarted her career in what she called "stealth-mode" as a contract programmer at Computer Applications, Inc. She went on to work at Memorex during 1969–1972 as a digital system designer and computer architect.

Conway joined Xerox PARC in 1973, where she led the "LSI Systems" group under Bert Sutherland. Collaborating with Carver Mead of Caltech on VLSI design methodology, she co-authored Introduction to VLSI Systems, a groundbreaking work that would soon become a standard textbook in chip design, used in over 100 universities by 1983. The book and early courses were the beginning of the Mead and Conway revolution in VLSI system design.

In 1978, Conway served as visiting associate professor of EECS at MIT, teaching a now famous VLSI design course based on a draft of the Mead–Conway text. The course validated the new design methods and textbook, and established the syllabus and instructor's guidebook used in later courses all around the world.

Among Conway's contributions were invention of dimensionless, scalable design rules that greatly simplified chip design and design tools, and invention of a new form of internet-based infrastructure for rapid-prototyping and short-run fabrication of large numbers of chip designs. The new infrastructure was institutionalized as the MOSIS system in 1981. Since then, MOSIS has fabricated more than 50,000 circuit designs for commercial firms, government agencies, and research and educational institutions around the world. Prominent VLSI researcher Charles Seitz commented that "MOSIS represented the first period since the pioneering work of Eckert and Mauchley on the ENIAC in the late 1940s that universities and small companies had access to state-of-the-art digital technology."

The research methods used to develop the Mead–Conway VLSI design methodology and the MOSIS prototype are documented in a 1981 Xerox report and the Euromicro Journal. The impact of the Mead–Conway work is described and time-lined in a number of historical overviews of computing. Conway and her colleagues have compiled an online archive of original papers that documents much of that work.

In the early 1980s, Conway left Xerox to join DARPA, where she was a key architect of the Defense Department's Strategic Computing Initiative, a research program studying high-performance computing, autonomous systems technology, and intelligent weapons technology.

In a USA Today article about Conway's joining DARPA, Mark Stefik, a Xerox scientist who worked with her, said "Lynn would like to live five lives in the course of one life" and that she's "charismatic and very energetic". Douglas Fairbairn, a former Xerox associate, said "She figures out a way so that everybody wins."

As sociologist Thomas Streeter discusses in The Net Effect: "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."

Conway joined the University of Michigan in 1985 as professor of electrical engineering and computer science, and associate dean of engineering. There she worked on "visual communications and control probing for basic system and user-interface concepts as applicable to hybridized internet/broadband-cable communications". She retired from active teaching and research in 1998, as professor emerita at Michigan.

In the fall of 2012, the IEEE published a special issue of the IEEE Solid-State Circuits Magazine devoted to Lynn Conway's career, including a career memoir by Lynn and peer commentaries by Chuck House, former Director of Engineering at HP, Carlo Séquin, Professor of EECS at U.C. Berkeley, and Ken Shepard, Professor of Electrical Engineering and Biomedical Engineering at Columbia University.

"Clearly a new paradigm had emerged . . . Importantly, imaginative support in terms of infrastructure and idea dissemination proved as valuable as the concepts, tools, and chips. The "electronic book" and the "foundry" were both prescient and necessary, providing momentum and proof-points." Jim Gibbons, former Dean of Engineering at Stanford University, further states that Lynn Conway, from his perspective, "...was the singular force behind the entire "foundry" development that emerged."Ken Shepard stated that "Lynn's amazing story of accomplishment and personal triumph in the face of personal adversity and overt discrimination should serve as an inspiration to all young engineers."

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. She began quietly coming out as a trans woman in 1999 to friends and colleagues about her past gender transition, using her personal website to tell the story in her own words. Her story was then more widely reported in 2000 in profiles in Scientific American and the Los Angeles Times.

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