Lynn Conway

Lynn Conway
January 1938 - June 2024
Computer scientist, electrical engineer and transgender activist

Lynn Conway grew up in White Plains, New York and grew to be fascinated by astronomy, maths, physics and electronics. She was perhaps destined to become an engineer.

Lynn joined MIT in the mid 1950s and by the early 1960s was at Columbia University's School of Engineering and Applied Science, which had close ties to IBM in the early days of digital computing. Lynn has described this time as "the beginning of a technological revolution". She was quickly recruited by IBM Research, working on a secretive supercomputer project and as part of that project, she developed innovative Dynamic Instruction Scheduling (DIS). The project was ultimately shelved, however, even though DIS proved to a fundamental advance in computer architecture that would become a standard feature in modern high performance microprocessors.

In 1968, Lynn was also working her way along another pioneering path, that of gender transition, that she had hoped would resolve the gender dysphoria she had struggled with since a child. IBM were not supportive though,  and Lynn lost her job.

Having completed her transition, Lynn began her career all over again in 1969, in what she later described as 'stealth mode', working first as a low level contract programmer but working her way up at the Memorex Corporation in the early 1970s, eventually developing the successful Memorex 7100 processor while never being open about her gender transition or her prior work at IBM.

At the same time, Intel launched the 4004 microprocessor, swiftly followed by the 8008, which revolutionised the digital world but then Memorex decided to leave the computer business. Facing unemployment once again, Lynn searched and found a position at Xerox PARC, where she found herself working amongst a number of women scientists.

By 1975, Lynn had started to confide in colleagues about her early work at IBM which ultimately led to work  finding solutions to the complexities of 'very large scale integrated circuits' or rather the design of chips that could cope with the rapidly increasing number of transistors required. Her work on DIS now came to the fore, this time as part of an innovative and supportive team at Xerox PARC that had access to interactive Xerox Alto innovations that allowed file sharing and remote interactions with colleagues using the new ARPANET.

The work ultimately led to the invention of dimensionless, scalable design rules for chip design, allowing for rapid prototyping and fabrication of new chip designs, which Lynn then taught back at MIT. The [Carver] Mead-Conway VLSI design methodology has since been recognised as a turning point in computing history and their 1979 book Introduction to VLSI Systems a 'Bible' of sorts. The book is held in our collection.

Lynn Conway went on to 'come out' as transgender in the early 2000s, as she began working to illuminate and normalise gender transition. By 2014 she had been recognised by TIME magazine as 'one of 21 transgender people who influenced American culture'.

In 2023, Lynn Conway gave a talk for the museum with Jim Boulton called 'Lines in the Sand' on her work on VLSI and on the comic they produced together about it, which you can buy in our shop. The video of the talk is available on our YouTube channel.

Books Written by Lynn Conway :

• Introduction to VLSI Systems