For the last few months, I’ve been going down a rabbit hole on the early days of semiconductors.
Fairchild Semiconductor. Intel. Noyce. Moore. Andy Grove. A bunch of brilliant men in white shirts figuring out how to put more and more transistors onto tiny pieces of silicon.
And then I stumbled onto Lynn Conway.
Conway was a computer scientist and electrical engineer whose work helped revolutionize how microchips were designed. Along with Carver Mead, she developed what became known as the Mead-Conway approach to VLSI design, helping make chip design easier to scale and accessible to far more people than the specialists inside semiconductor companies. Thousands of engineers and students learned from the textbook they wrote together.
Pretty consequential stuff.
But honestly, that’s not the part of her story I can’t stop thinking about.
Conway started her career at IBM in the 1960s and was already doing pioneering work in computer architecture. Then, in 1968, she told IBM she intended to transition.
They fired her.
I try to imagine what that must have been like. Being a woman in tech during that era would have been hard enough. Being a transgender woman in 1968, trying to build a career in one of the most male-dominated industries on earth, is difficult for me to even comprehend.
For most people, getting fired from IBM under those circumstances could have been the end of the story.
For Conway, it became the beginning of the second act.
She rebuilt her career, eventually landed at Xerox PARC, helped transform chip design, worked at DARPA, taught at the University of Michigan, and decades later became a prominent advocate for transgender people in technology.
She died in 2024 at 86. I obviously never knew her, but after reading about her life, I kept having the same thought.
Boy, would I have loved to grab a beverage with her.
She seems like she would have been kickass cool. More people should know her story.
Oh, and IBM eventually apologized.
It only took them 52 years.
Roll credits.