Lynn Conway

From Free net encyclopedia

Lynn Conway (born 1937) is a U.S. computer scientist and inventor. She worked at IBM in the 1960s and is credited with the invention of generalised dynamic instruction handling, a key advance used in out-of-order execution, used by almost all modern processors to improve performance.

Conway was fired by IBM in 1968 after revealing to them that she was transsexual, and was planning on transitioning to a female gender role. She was treated by Harry Benjamin. She had made an earlier transition attempt in the late 1950s that failed due to the medical climate at the time.

After losing her IBM job and access to her children, she started again from the ground up, stealth, as a contract programmer. She joined Xerox PARC in 1973, where she worked on VLSI design. With Carver Mead she co-authored Introduction to VLSI Systems, a groundbreaking work that would soon become a standard textbook.

In the early 1980s Conway worked for DARPA on strategic computing, and then became a Professor at the University of Michigan in 1985. Having retired from her professorship in December 1998, she decided to out herself as a transsexual woman again in 1999 after she realised that the story of her IBM work might soon come out. Since then, she has been a prominent spokesperson for rights of transsexual people.

In 2002, Conway married her husband, Charlie, and she now lives with him in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

External links

• Lynn Conway's website. Primarily written in English, but many articles are provided in other languages as well.

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