Lynn Conway

Lynn Conway was born in Mount Vernon, New York, in 1938. She was a shy, gifted child who was assigned male at birth and knew from early on that this was wrong. She went to MIT, dropped out in distress, worked as an electronics technician, then returned to study at Columbia and was hired by IBM Research in 1964. There, on a project to build a supercomputer, she invented a way for a processor to run instructions out of order. The idea is inside almost every chip today.

In 1968 she told IBM she intended to transition. The company fired her. She lost her job, her marriage and access to her two children. She restarted as a contract programmer under a new name, telling no one about her past, and worked her way back up through Memorex to Xerox PARC in 1973.

At PARC she and Carver Mead took the messy craft of chip layout and turned it into a set of simple rules that any engineer could learn. Their 1980 textbook, and a course she ran in which students designed chips that were then actually fabricated, produced the VLSI revolution and a generation of chip designers. She later ran a programme at DARPA and became a professor at Michigan.

Her IBM work had been forgotten, and when historians began piecing it together in 1999 she chose to come out rather than be outed. In 2020 IBM formally apologised. She died in 2024.