Lynn Conway
Lynn Ann Conway (born January 10, 1938 in Mount Vernon , NY ) is an American computer scientist , inventor and activist in the Transgender rights movement , an American movement to promote the rights of transsexuals or transgender people .
Life
Conway worked at IBM in the 1960s . It is attributed to the invention of "generalized dynamic instruction handling", important for out-of-order execution in computers.
After Conway revealed her transsexuality in 1968, she was unceremoniously dismissed by IBM. After her release, she decided to finally reassign her sex and went to the treatment of the German-born psychologist and sex doctor Harry Benjamin . Conway had already made a first attempt at a gender reassignment measure in the 1950s, but failed because of the poor clinical possibilities of the time.
During her time in the male role, Conway was married to a woman and has two children from that marriage.
Work and research
After her gender reassignment, Conway started working at Xerox PARC in 1973 on the development of new techniques and methods for the VLSI design, with an interruption in 1978 to work as a visiting professor at MIT
Together with Carver Mead , she triggered the global VLSI revolution . With Carver Mead, she also wrote the groundbreaking bestseller Introduction to VLSI Systems , an important publication in the context of the design revolution .
In the early 1980s she worked for DARPA on the Strategic Computing Initiative of the United States Department of Defense and then became a professor at the University of Michigan in 1989 . For her contribution to the VLSI design, she was elected a Fellow by the IEEE in 1985 and was accepted into the National Academy of Engineering in 1989 . In 2014 she became a Fellow of the Computer History Museum . In 2016 she was elected a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science .
Coming out
After Conway resigned her professorship in December 1998, she ventured to the unpleasant IBM's history in the 1960s, a renewed coming out in 1999 as a transsexual woman ( Trans woman ). Lynn Conway has since stood up as a prominent spokeswoman for the rights of transgender people. In 2002 she married her long-term partner.
literature
- Lynn Conway: Reminiscences of the VLSI Revolution: How a Series of Failures Triggered a Paradigm Shift in Digital Design (PDF). In: IEEE Solid-State Circuits Magazine. Volume 4, No. 4, 2012, pp. 8–31.
- Lynn Conway: IBM-ACS: Reminiscences and Lessons Learned from a 1960's Supercomputer Project (PDF). In: Cliff Jones, John L. Lloyd (Eds.): Dependable and Historic Computing: Essays Dedicated to Brian Randell on the Occasion of his 75th Birthday. Springer-Verlag, Heidelberg 2011, ISBN 978-3-642-24541-1 pp. 185-224.
- Carver Mead, Lynn Conway: Introduction to VLSI Systems . Addison-Wesley, Boston, USA 1980, ISBN 0201043580 .
Web links
- Literature by and about Lynn Conway in the WorldCat bibliographic database
- Lynn Conway's website
- Mead & Conway Revolution
- The VLSI design revolution
- National Academy of Engineering
- IEEE Solid-State Circuit Magazine (PDF; 4.7 MB)
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Conway, Lynn |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | Conway, Lynn Ann |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | American computer scientist and inventor |
| DATE OF BIRTH | January 10, 1938 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Mount Vernon |