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Lynn Conway has died

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Re: Lynn Conway has died

#391

Post by HarHarVeryFunny »

We covered VLSI design as part of Comp. Sci at Bristol, UK c.1980, based on Conway & Mead's "Introduction to VLSI systems".

Comp. Sci was mostly software, but we also did some 7400 series TTL bread boarding in the lab - building things like traffic-light LED sequencers based on DIY flip flops made out of NAND gates.

VLSI design was a revelation - that there was a different way to designing things than out of TTL "lego bricks", and that you could go full custom instead !

I was never aware of Lynn Conway's personal transgender challenges - more power to her for having had such an amazing career and impact while dealing with this.

Re: Lynn Conway has died

#392

Post by pclmulqdq »

jefftk wrote: post #379
duskwuff wrote: post #355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They optimize on a different level. Instead of trying to optimize the arrangement of individual transistors, you start with a set of standard cells which contain optimized transistor-level implementations of individual gates, and have your design tools optimize the placement and routing of those cells within a grid system.

Does that mean there's an opportunity for increasing performance by bringing collections of gates into scope for optimization? Or does that not actually let you decrease transistors very much?

There is some, but most of that actually gets pulled into standard cell libraries (the gate libraries), which are very big collections of primitives. Most of them have a lot more than just the standard gates you think of - they include many 3-input gates, adder cells, multiplexer cells, flip flops of all kinds, and all sorts of other basic building blocks that are micro-optimized. They tend to use a standard width of 7 or 9 "tracks," where a track is defined by the width of the lowest metal layer, and the optimization comes from reducing the length of the gate. They also have gates of different sizes/strengths, so you can use the weak and small version on paths that are not critical, and the bigger and faster versions on critical paths.

Re: Lynn Conway has died

#393

Post by pclmulqdq »

lksajdl3lfkjasl wrote: post #383
pclmulqdq wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I ended up teaching Carver Mead's course in its last year at Caltech, which was quite an experience. In many ways, the course was (and is) horribly out of date, and not just because of the fact that students were using open-source Berkeley tools to draw layouts. The real reason why this course was obsolete was that Mead and Conway so thoroughly won the argument on the idea of creating rigorous abstractions that peopl…

I'm not sure if you are talking about MAGIC for the layout. That is what I used back in the day. I was surprised to find out later in my professional career that this was created by John Ousterhout, the same person who created Tcl/Tk. It's really amazing to me how versatile these early hackers were.

I am talking about MAGIC for layout, but there is a whole suite of tools from the same lab. IRSIM is a switch-level simulator that's also very useful, and there are a number of other tools for schematic capture, analog stuff, and a whole digital synthesis flow.

It's all open-source, and if you're building a chip with an SCMOS process or another process with lambda-based design rules, it's still a pretty nice set of tools to use.

Incidentally, if you're building open-source silicon, MAGIC is somewhere in that process, and I assume the Berkeley logic placer is still there even though the front-end is usually something else.

Re: Lynn Conway has died

#396

Post by pfdietz »

lemper wrote: post #344

i have some questions. if an academia transitions after their graduation, what would be written in the papers? the deadname or the current name? or one can ask the authoritative institution to issue new papers with the current name on it? also, what would happen to their publication? i genuinely have never thought of it before.

I believe the deadname stays on old publications, although in today's electronic publications it could be updated.

The example I think of is the person who built one of the first superoptimizers.

Re: Lynn Conway has died

#398

Post by lynndotpy »

bsaul wrote: post #275

Is it an impression , or are computer people overly represented amongst trans people ? Maybe working with computers provides a better environment for people with social-related issues ?

I think so, but especially since the advent of the internet.

I think a mixture of being (1) a small minority (~1%), (2) which is ostracized, and (3) exists roughly homogenously in the population meant the internet provided an opportunity for community that didn't exist before.

The big thing is the super low-risk and anonymous environment. If you're gay but feel shame about it, or that you might suffer violence for coming out, then your computer might be the first place you don't feel alone.

For ~1980 through ~2010, community meant having a sysadmin to host a bbs / usenet / email list / irc / phpbb, and community meant having the technical knowledge required to join one of those. So, lgbt people and trans people especially have a good reason to become computer people.

I think this pattern applies to other groups which meet the same criteria. E.g. people at far ends of the political spectrum, the extremes you might have found under alt.sex, fans of specific media like TV shows, or people talking about weird alternative operating systems.

Re: Lynn Conway has died

#399

Post by nh23423fefe »

immibis wrote: post #385
skissane wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Open-source projects depend on their community and contributors, and community management is inherently political. No matter what "neutral" thing you do, some contributors will approve of that, and some will see it as a red flag. There's this saying some people have, "there's three things you don't talk about at work: sex, politics and religion". (I think an older version had "money" instead of "sex"–from the days…

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