But for years, Conway’s role was overshadowed by that of her male collaborator
#Carver #Mead and other "founding fathers" of Silicon Valley.

That, she argues, was partly because she is a woman and partly because she had been forced to live much of her life in "stealth",
leery of attracting attention lest she be outed to a hostile world.

She had already been forced to restart her career from scratch with a new identity in 1969,
after being fired by IBM for telling her bosses she was #transitioning.

The rupture meant she could not claim credit for techniques she had invented there, even as they became standard practice across the industry.

And so, over the past two decades, Conway has been investigating
– and attempting to reverse
– what she describes as her "disappearance" from history,
chronicling her experiences both as a computing and a gender trailblazer.

Slowly, that recognition is coming to pass.

In 2009, she received an award from the engineering trade group, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers(IEEE).

In 2020, IBM finally apologised for firing her 42 years earlier.

And this October she was inducted into the National Inventors’ Hall of Fame
as the co-creator of VLSI
– 14 years after Mead received the same honour.

Now, speaking to The Independent, Conway wants the world to understand what made that revolution possible and why she feels so strongly about telling her side of the story.

"What I’m interested in... isn’t so much who I am, but what I actually did," she says.

"The joy I felt – the joy of discovery. The daring to push send on something that I knew was going to change the world.

#Lynn #Conway #VLSI

"Those were the moments that mattered to me, and I want to talk about them so that people can learn to notice:

how do you do stuff like that?
Where do you get the nerve to take that risk?"

‘I just noticed whole industries had no clue what they were doing’

Conway was born in 1938 in White Plains, just outside New York City, four years before the completion of the world’s first electronic digital computer.

As a child she remembers standing in her family’s garden shortly after Pearl Harbour, watching her father demonstrate a fire extinguisher designed to protect their roof from incendiary bombs.

Today she lives on a 23-acre plot outside Ann Arbor with her husband Charlie ("a teddy bear," she says), whom she married in 2002.

She has two children, four grandchildren, and six great-grandchildren stemming from a previous marriage, plus a rotating cast of cats.

These days she has largely retired from sports such as rock climbing and motocross
("getting old is a real serious adventure sport").

But her conversations have a playful agility, leaping unpredictably from topic to topic, sometimes in mid-sentence,
peppering her speech with "you see?" while she traces surprising lateral connections between the rise of Christian nationalism, the Wizard of Oz books, and the 2022 film Monica.

"I’m actually kind of wacky, see?" she laughs. "And I admit that."

#Carver #Mead #transitioning #Lynn #Conway #VLSI

Wackiness was hardly unusual in early Silicon Valley.

After graduating from Columbia University in the early Sixties, Conway had moved to Menlo Park, California
– now the home of Facebook’s parent company Meta
– to work on a secretive IBM supercomputer known as Project Y.

Her team was considered so nerdy and eccentric that the project leader was nicknamed "the Zookeeper".

In 1973, under a new name, she joined Xerox’s famous PARC lab in nearby Palo Alto, which pioneered now-ubiquitous concepts such as the personal computer, the mouse, and the digital desktop interface.

It was there that she noticed "whole industries had no clue what they were doing".

The problem was the ballooning complexity of designing new microchips.

The number of transistors that could be packed into one chip was growing exponentially
– a phenomenon dubbed "Moore’s Law" by the engineering professor Carver Mead.

Yet actually taking advantage of such power was difficult because chip design was still a bespoke, effectively manual process.

Mead had long been studying this problem, and in 1976 he and Conway began working together on a solution.

Their innovation was to develop simple rules for grouping transistors together into standardised clusters, like blocks of buildings in a city, which could be arranged on a grid in standardised patterns.

It was, Conway explains, comparable to the impact of the moveable type printing press on European literature
– allowing each new page to be quickly assembled out of alphabetic components rather than laboriously carved into one block of wood.

Instead of trying to go through traditional chipmakers, Conway wanted to spread this method across the world as fast as possible, hoping to give other people the tools to create change.

Throughout 1977 and 1978, she used the new-fangled equipment at PARC
– including home printers and the early internet
– to rapidly assemble and edit these ideas into a bombshell textbook on VLSI design, co-authored with Mead.

She soon became VLSI’s chief evangelist,
first teaching an MIT course where students could get their own microchip designs printed within a few weeks,
then building an online system that extended this capability to a nationwide network of similar courses.

#Carver #Mead #transitioning #Lynn #Conway #VLSI

As she rode the wave, Conway remembers feeling a "complete resonance with the universe".

She says: "I was so completely, manically joyful that I was, like, whacko!

That’s the way it is when crazy things are happening, like in a cool start-up... you’re just having so much fun."

Soon the Feds came knocking, and in 1983 Conway was recruited by the US military research agency DARPA.

The background checks went so smoothly that she is sure she wasn’t the Pentagon’s first trans employee, although she never ran into any others.

In 1985 she switched to academia at the University of Michigan, where she remains a professor emerita today.

At first, Conway was generally recognised alongside Mead as the progenitor of VLSI.

Throughout the 1980s they received multiple joint awards. But in the 2000s and 2010s Conway’s honours began to dry up, while Mead’s accelerated.

Conway traces that change in part to the influence of George Gilder,
a former speechwriter for Ronald Reagan and anti-feminist author turned internet evangelist,
who lionised Mead in his best-selling 1989 book Microcosm.

"Mead probably thinks it was 80/20 him; most people, I think, in the long term, will find it was really 80/20 me," she says, matter-of-factly.

For his part, Mead tells The Independent that he never sought out those awards and wasn't party to their decision process,
but strongly supported Conway's nomination to the National Inventors' Hall of Fame.

"I certainly empathise with Lynn's feelings on these matters… without her leadership I think the VLSI revolution would have taken much longer," he says.

As to the share of credit for VLSI, he says:
"From 1971 to 1972, it was 100 per cent me.

That decreased with time. After [late 1979] I was really burned out, and Lynn was leading the charge.

For that period, I'll go with her number."

#Carver #Mead #transitioning #Lynn #Conway #VLSI

A ‘haunted’ world where transphobic violence was the norm

At the tail end of the 1950s, one of Conway’s friends introduced her to the dean of a prestigious medical school.

She’d heard stories about people changing their sex, and she wanted to know: was it really possible?

Absolutely not, the dean told her.

Such procedures could only make her a "freak", and pursuing them would likely end up with her in a mental institution.

"That set me back," she recalls. "That was horrible."

This was the environment in which Conway came of age.

She remembers family holidays in Texas where she witnessed how Black people were treated by local whites
– a glimpse of the violence lurking underneath the "appearance of normalcy" that adults seemed to cling to.

"It was like the world was haunted," she says.

"You go to church on Sunday and everyone’s pretending this is all wonderful.
But it’s not all wonderful, and if you get any hint that you might fall into one of these categories,
it’s like suddenly you’re in the middle ages,
and there’s spirits and terrors and devils that are gonna get you."
#Carver #Mead #transitioning #Lynn #Conway #VLSI