Remembering the trans woman who gave us the microprocessor, multi-tasking, and paved the way for the Internet
Lynn Conway's contributions to the tech industry and the LGBT movement cannot be understated and she will be dearly missed not just in our community but the world at large.
This is a late post for Pride month, sorry for the delay!
I was scrolling on Threads the other day (like most days) and I came across this image. Lynn Ann Conway (January 2, 1938 – June 9, 2024) was a transgender woman, activist, computer scientist and electrical engineer.
It is to my deep shame that I didn’t already know about Lynn Conway or her contributions to everyday technologies like the microchips that power our smartphones, computers and tablets, the network technologies that power the modern Internet, or her contributions to the LGBT movement. I was however inspired to learn more about a woman who was like me and persevered.
As a child, Lynn was fascinated by astronomy and even built her own telescope one summer vacation. She was a shy girl experiencing gender dysphoria with no options to affirm her gender. Even today, few transgender youth have access to the healthcare and help they need to feel comfortable in their own bodies.
She went to M.I.T. to study physics at the age of 17, excelling and making the High Honors Dean’s List and placed in the top 2% of her class. At this stage of her education Lynn said she “began to be seen as a resource by my M.I.T. friends, as someone who could distill and explain the principles of things in cool ways they hadn't picked up in the classroom.” This self-understanding influenced her approach to learning and science for the rest of her life.
Lynn attempted to transition in private and presented as a boy in her classes, but this dynamic became untenable over the years. She began self-medicating with injectable estrogen and the effects brought her ever closer to the body she wished she had. The closer she got, the more upsetting having to blend in became.
She left M.I.T. before finishing her undergrad. She met with a medical professional hoping for surgical options to aid in her transition and was instead shamed, mocked, and turned away. She became fearful of being institutionalized or jailed, and she worried that she’d never find a man to love her as she was.
In the late 50s and early 60s, she had limited resources to even understand who and what she was or what to do about it. She found love a number of times, but she felt adrift and isolated regardless.
She went back to school, this time at Columbia University’s School of Engineering and Applied Science, in 1962. By 1963, she had her bachelors and her masters and by 1964, she was working for IBM.
Lynn worked on the Advanced Computing Systems (ACS) project, where she made significant contributions to computer architecture. She developed the concept of dynamic instruction scheduling, a key innovation that improved the performance of computer processors by allowing processors to execute commands out of order based on what resources are available in any clock cycle. Effectively, this means processors didn’t wait for each task to complete in order and instead processes multiple tasks at once, leading to reduced idle time and higher efficiency. Without this advancement, we wouldn’t have multi-tasking, multi-core CPUs, or modern graphics processing and things like computer gaming and virtual reality would be considered science fiction today.
In 1968, Conway was fired from IBM when she announced her intention to transition, despite her many achievements at the company. It was legal in the US to fire someone for being transgender until as recent as 2020, when the Supreme Court ruled this violated Title VII protections.
At this point, Lynn changed her name and assumed her new identity, continuing to work in tech as her authentic self in “stealth mode.” She went to Xerox in the 70s where she led a team which pioneered multi-project wafers, which allowed multiple circuit designs to be printed on the same silicon wafer. This dramatically reduced cost and production time for circuit boards and is the process still used today to mass produce the wafers we rely on in consumer technology.
She helped to develop the VLSI method which dramatically increased the number of transistors that could be placed on a chip. Before VLSI, chips could only hold a few hundred or thousand transistors; now, chips can hold millions to billions of transistors. This increased computing power is crucial for running complex algorithms, including those used in neural networks which power today’s A.I. models.
She left Xerox in the 80s to join DARPA, a DOD research project where she helped to develop the early communications protocols that the infrastructure of the Internet is based on. Put simply, we wouldn’t be online today without Lynn Conway.
Mark Stefik, a Xerox scientist who worked with her, said "Lynn would like to live five lives in the course of one life."
Conway was outed in the press in the early 2000s, forcing her to being coming out in 1999 to her friends and colleagues. She had been passing for decades. She published her own account of her life, her transition, and her work online to tell it in her own words. From this point on, she became a vocal advocate for transgender rights and the wider LGBT movement.
In 2009, she was named one of the Stonewall 40 trans heroes on the 40th anniversary of the Stonewall Riots, which sparked the beginning of the modern LGBT movement. The International Court System and the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force recognized her as one of the most influential trans people of our time.
52 years after she was fired from IBM, Lynn was awarded a Lifetime Achievement Award and received a public apology from IBM. She sat down for a speaking event with Diane Gherson, IBM’s senior VP of HR, where she received the award.
Lynn Conway passed away on June 9 of this year at the age of 86, in a hospital from complications of two recent heart attacks, according to her husband. She is survived by her husband, Charles Rogers, as well as her estranged daughters and six grandchildren.