Lynn Conway
Hello and welcome to Queer STEM History, a podcast where we're exploring the lives of some notable, but maybe not as well known, queer scientists throughout the ages. I'm one of your hosts, Len, and I use they/ them pronouns. And I'm your other host Lauren, and I use she/her pronouns. This podcast is a project as part of our Masters of Science Communication at the Australian National University, so please forgive us this is our first time ever podcasting.
Now, basically in this podcast what we want to do is share really interesting stories from cool, queer scientists because, ah, while I was studying my degree, I didn't really have any queer science role models to look up to either in my lab or any historic ones, that I knew of at least, except for Alan Turing. So, I think it's really important that we are able to share some of these stories, so we hopefully have more role models. Yeah, I hadn't heard of many historical role models, but I know that entering my first year of university, um, one of my lab groups there was one person who I didn't even explicitly know was queer but gave off queer vibes and just having that one person there really made it feel like a lot more comfortable place to work in when I was a scared little first year. I'm so jealous!
So, for our first story today, we’re going to be talking about Lynn Conway, who is a really extremely highly regarded and really well awarded American computer scientist and electrical engineer. Ah, she is particularly well known for basically revolutionizing computer science back in the 1970s, where she made major contributions to something called VLSI technology. Now, neither Lauren or I are computer scientists. Definitely not. So, we may butcher a bit of this terminology and understanding of it, but from what I gather VLSI while sounding like a fancy acronym actually just stands for four simple words that I know - very large scale integration, and it's the process of creating an integrated circuit by combining millions of transistors or devices on a single chip. So basically, putting a lot of stuff into a small space. So, Lynn Conway and her supervisor Carver Mead, wrote the book, I mean literally wrote the textbook that has been used by probably hundreds of thousands of students on VLSI. And by doing so, they really helped to simplify this really extreme process of putting what's millions of different devices onto a single silicon chip. And this allowed for huge leaps in computing.
And for this work on VLSI as well as her future work with the Strategic Computing Initiative and the University of Michigan Lynn won so many different awards and honours throughout her career, including becoming a member of the National Academy of Engineering, which is the highest possible honor for engineers. But what no one knew until the early 2000s was that Lynn was actually responsible for another hugely important invention in computing, so she didn't just have one claim to fame, but she had two!
So, while she was at IBM back in the 1960s, right after she'd finished her Master's degree at Colombia Lynn was working on this huge project called ACS or the Advanced Computing Systems Project, which was basically given the mission by IBM CEO to go for broke to create the most powerful scientific computer ever. And while she's actually working on this project, Lynn invented something called dynamic instruction scheduling or DIS, which basically means that if you have, if a computer has a whole bunch of instructions and some at the front are being a bit slow, you can search ahead in the queue to issue out of order instructions, which makes things go a lot faster. And this technique is actually used by most modern computers today. So you've used it, I’ve used it, and it really improves the performance of these devices greatly. So by the 1990s they were being used in basically every single PC chip and making them a lot more powerful than they otherwise would have been. So it represents this giant leap in computer science.
Most researchers thought that it was just like a generalization of decades of work. Um, they had no idea that it actually had been invented in 1965 by Lynn Conway. And it really annoyed her seeing all this, seeing her wonderful invention used everywhere and described in all these textbooks but no one knew was her idea and she wasn't getting any credit for it. How could have this happened, and why did she remain silent for over three decades about her important IBM work.
The reason that no one knew that Lynn Conway had invented DIS at IBM is that back in 1968 IBM terminated Lynn's really promising computer science career after learning that she was transitioning from male to female. Now, the crazy thing is is that her immediate colleagues and the local HR staff she went to first, they were initially really supportive and they put in a really good word for her. And they worked out this arrangement that would allow Lynn to continue working at IBM, ah to transfer to a different location and continue working with the company with her new name. But then the matter was escalated to the corporate executive team and the IBM CEO himself T. J. Watson Jr. made the call to cancel this arrangement and fire Lynn immediately, right before, ah, she was planning on her transition. Now, to her family, friends and coworkers, IBM’s initial acceptance of her represented society's acceptance. Everyone supported her when it seemed like the company was on her side. But once they turned around and fired her the personal support began to wane too.
And I think that's still really a critical issue today where we've got all these huge companies and corporations and it's actually pretty important for them to be taking a stand cause that can help to define societal acceptance. Think about Pride Month how all these companies change their logo's to rainbows or companies that do even more, like Ben and Jerry’s does a lot of good work where they raise awareness, they had their they couldn't sell two scoops of the same flavor in Australia till we passed the plebiscite. And they do this in a lot of countries, even when it hurts their business. And that kind of stand really shows that if these big businesses can stand up for us, small people can too, and hopefully inspires the general public. Yeah definitely. I know a lot of people in the queer community get really frustrated by the whole rainbowfication only during Pride Month, um, and of corporate involvement in pride parades. But you know, it is really important that we do recognize that companies are changing. You know, this terrible thing happened at IBM in the sixties but now I would assume that society has moved forward a lot. We need to continue to take these steps forward, it’s definitely not perfect yet. But by these companies and corporations showing their public support for the queer community and for their employees, that does have a wider impact on society. Yeah definitely.
So once Lynn was fired from IBM, she went outside the US to have a surgery for her physical transition, then came back and started her life all over again. She had to leave behind all of her previous work and had to reenter the workforce with a new identity. She couldn't talk about how she'd previously studied at MIT and Columbia or that she'd worked on this huge super computer project at IBM. She describes having to restart her career at the bottom of the ladder as a contract programmer as working in stealth mode. And she says it was a really terrifying time. In an article, she wrote in 2012 she described as being "any public outing would have killed my new career, and I could have ended up unemployed, a social outcast living on the streets or worse."
But in her new job Lynn actually quickly moved up the ranks. She started this really basic position because she had none of the credentials. But because of her obvious talent and ability, she was able to move up the ranks and begin some really exciting projects. And 13 years later as she was about to retire as a professor at the University of Michigan in late 1998 Lynn casually typed in the word super scalar into an Internet search to see if her work back in the sixties had got anywhere and a news news article popped up “IBM ACS - The first super scalar computer?" A computer historian Mark Smotherman at Clemson University had stumbled onto information about the old project and theorised in his website that ACS was indeed the first to come up with this technology. Um, this had become a question of historical interest because of recent successes in, of other super scalar microprocessors, and stunned Lynn realized that the story of her involvement would eventually come out and that she needed to get out ahead of it.
So, she contacted Mark and gradually revealed her role in the project. Fortunately, when she'd been fired she’d actually saved all her documentations from the original work and the company was so preoccupied with getting rid of her they never asked for any of that information back. She saved it and carefully archived it. And luckily she did so she was able to prove her identity and claims.
She didn't take this decision to contact Mark to talk about her role at IBM and inventing DIS lightly. This was a really difficult choice after 31 long years of her new career, um, that it was a very hard decision for her to decide to come out and talk about what her role was.
So what Lynn decided to do was to do it gradually and quietly by first informing her friends and colleagues. And she actually set up a website that would allow her to tell her story in her own words, rather than relying on other people to spill it out without her permission or knowledge. Ah, and Lynn's story became increasingly widely read over the following years and her website www.lynnconway.com which I really recommend that you check out because it is just an incredible resource, has become this hugely informational site that has been translated into most of the world's major languages. Um after publicly going out with her story she began to work as a transgender activist, intending to illuminate and normalise issues of gender identity and the process of gender transition. Um and there's a lot of resources like this on the website, she’s worked to protect and expand the rights of transgender people. She's provided direct and indirect assistance to numerous other transgender women going through transition and maintains the website she runs provides both emotional and medical resources and advice to anyone who needs to read it. The website has also been translated in most of the world's major languages, making it hugely accessible. And she maintains listings of many transgender people, in her words, to provide role models to individuals who are facing a gender transition, kind of like what we're doing here with our podcast, just providing these inspirational role models.
Another really important role that Lynn has increasingly taken on since coming out in the early 2000s as a transgender woman is consulting with some of these really big companies about their discrimination policies to make sure that they are really living up to their diverse and inclusive commitments that they make and to make sure that there are employment protections for members of the queer community to make sure that they can work in a safe environment. Many high-tech firms have already adopted such protections, including major firms such as Apple, HP, Intel, Kodak the list goes on and on and even IBM.
Um, but something I just really wanted to bring up is that while researching for this podcast, I’ve been quite frustrated when you know the personal life of these people is kind of just brushed aside or not included. And even though Lynn has had such a hugely successful professional life, she's won so many different numerous awards, has won lots of honorary doctorates, even being named like Computer Pioneer of the Year, and also being really widely recognized within the LGBTQIA+ community - she was a 2009 Stonewall hero, but something I really want to talk about was the fact that in 1987 Conway met her future husband, Charlie Rogers, who was also a professional engineer, and they actually still live together on a 24 acre farm that they bought in 1994 and they were married in 2002. It’s couple goals, I really wish I could live on a 24-acre farm. Right! So many chickens!
Um, so I really hope you enjoyed our story about Lynn Conway, going through a bit of her role in two revolutions in computer science and also her activism within the queer community. We will be returning next week with another profile of a queer scientist. But first we want to thank the Australian National Center for Public Awareness of Science, whose podcast studio is what we're using right now and has really made this podcast possible. You can find us on Facebook at Queer STEM History, on Twitter at QSTEM History, or on our website. Links to all of these are on the podcast description, and you can also find our show notes on our website for further resources on this topic. We hope you all enjoyed listening, we will see you all next week for another installment of this series.
[BLOOPER] a hugely important invention, that allowed chips to hold so many transitions transistors that they ... so many transitions hey, spoilers! boy, That's a slip