I recommend reading Lynn's story, written in her own words: https://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/conway/RetrospectiveT.html It is amazing, tragic, and triumphant in so many ways.
Same link without SSL errors: https://archive.is/zVIWu
Lynn Conway has died
41–50 of 429 posts
Re: Lynn Conway has died
#42Earlier quoted context omitted.
Honestly considering Lynn Conway’s Wikipedia profile mentions being a transgender activist and not knowing much about either of them, I thought maybe I’d just missed that John Conway had transitioned at some point, and had now died.
It really doesn't help that the Wikipedia page doesn't currently appear to state the former name anywhere, like it often does for other people (like celebrities) who legally change their names at some point in their lives.
There's a whole set of criteria for when Wikipedia will and will not list former names for people who transition, which boils down to whether they achieved notability under the old name. Which Lynn did not.
There's a conversation to be had about whether the decisions Wikipedia has made about prior names and consistent use of pronouns in the biography of trans persons is the correct one for an encyclopedia. But this is definitely not the place or time to have that conversation.
Re: Lynn Conway has died
#43Earlier quoted context omitted.
Thanks for sharing! In case anyone knows, what's the best way to get this to be readable on an e-reader? Haven't found a PDF yet, probably exporting into a PDF is the easiest since it's only a couple dozen pages maybe?!
Save as HTML with images and run through Calibre: $ ebook-convert index.html book.epub Here are the files if you trust a rando on the internet. Since they're just ZIP archives, you can unpack and inspect both to make sure there's no JS there. .mobi looks fine on my Kindle. https://0x0.st/Xc8M.epub https://0x0.st/Xc8B.mobi
> if you trust a rando on the internet
Why did you say that, now I have to check the files :)
Thank you
Re: Lynn Conway has died
#44Why does the Wiki page say "citation needed" for calling her a "computer scientist, electrical engineer"?
Re: Lynn Conway has died
#45I recommend reading Lynn's story, written in her own words: https://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/conway/RetrospectiveT.html It is amazing, tragic, and triumphant in so many ways.
Thanks for sharing! In case anyone knows, what's the best way to get this to be readable on an e-reader? Haven't found a PDF yet, probably exporting into a PDF is the easiest since it's only a couple dozen pages maybe?!
MediaWiki2Latex can convert to ePub.
Re: Lynn Conway has died
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
It really doesn't help that the Wikipedia page doesn't currently appear to state the former name anywhere, like it often does for other people (like celebrities) who legally change their names at some point in their lives.
This is in keeping with their gender identity guidelines. > Former, pre-transition names may only be included if the person was notable while using the name; outside of the main biographical article, such names should only appear once, in a footnote or parentheses.
> if the person was notable while using the name
ACS was a notable project and her involvement in it, pre-transition, was notable.
Re: Lynn Conway has died
#47If this is verified, I think a black band is 100% warranted. As I understand it, she was a real innovator in VLSI, which I think we all agree is somewhat important :) EDIT: GG, the black band appeared as I sent this
While her contributions to the VLSI design methodologies are the best known and the most influential, that is because at that time she worked in academia, in plain sight.
She had another extremely important contribution much earlier, when working at IBM, at the Advanced Computer System project.
She invented the first methods that could be used for designing a CPU that can initiate multiple instructions in the same clock cycle and also out of order in comparison with the program. Such a CPU will be named only 2 decades later as a superscalar CPU (also inside IBM and by people familiar with the old ACS project). (The earlier CDC 6600 could initiate only 1 instruction per clock cycle, in program order, even if after initiation it could execute the instructions concurrently and complete them out-of-order, depending on the availability of execution units.)
Her work on superscalar CPUs did not become known until much later, because it was written in confidential internal reports about the ACS project, which was canceled, unlike the later and much less comprehensive work of Tomasulo, which was published in a journal and which was used in a commercial product, so it became the reference on out-of-order execution in the open literature, for several decades.
At the time when she worked at IBM, her legal gender was still male, and when she announced her intention of gender change, she was fired by IBM, which is likely to have contributed to the obscurity that covered her ACS work at IBM.
Her "Dynamic Instruction Scheduling" report from 1966 is mandatory reading for anyone who is interested about the evolution of the superscalar and out-of-order CPUs.
https://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/conway/ACS/Archive/ACSarchi...
Re: Lynn Conway has died
#48Why does the Wiki page say "citation needed" for calling her a "computer scientist, electrical engineer"?
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Re: Lynn Conway has died
#49Thank you for the inspiration as I continue my gender transition. I appreciate your struggles and dedication to living a life that was "for you" and not for anyone else. RIP.
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Re: Lynn Conway has died
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is in keeping with their gender identity guidelines. > Former, pre-transition names may only be included if the person was notable while using the name; outside of the main biographical article, such names should only appear once, in a footnote or parentheses.
> if the person was notable while using the name ACS was a notable project and her involvement in it, pre-transition, was notable.
I guess the point is that she, herself, was not notable at that point, since her work was not widely and publicly known. Otherwise we'd already know her pre-transition name.