I was in a Starbucks when I saw Dave Farber's message on his IP mailing list saying that Lynn Conway had passed away, and I said out loud, "Oh, no!" and started crying. She was a hero and an icon, and stands high in our technical pantheon.
Of course, every person has the fundamental human right to live
as they are, as they understand themselves to be, and the rest of
us get no say in who they are. Saying, "It's okay that Freddie
Mercury was gay, he was an amazing singer and artist,"
fundamentally misunderstands this. The vast majority of LGBTQ+
people are perfectly ordinary people, and that is perfectly fine.
Margo Selzer said, "It is not the job of the underrepresented to
solve underrepresentation," and the same is true for other aspects
of life as a minority. It's the job of the majority to change
ourselves to be accepting; no minority should be required to step
up and be a hero. So, Lynn "owed" no one her work as an activist;
it was a role she chose late in life, and we should be grateful
for it.
FWIW, it took IBM 52 years to get around to apologizing for
firing her (falling just short of the 55 years it took the UK
government to apologize for chemically castrating Alan Turing for being gay).
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/21/business/lynn-conway-ibm-transgender.html
As it happens, I was talking to a couple of students yesterday about citation counts for researchers in computer science and electrical engineering, and we found a website where the top researcher has half a million citations. You won't find Lynn's name on a list like that, and yet I would put her contribution far above almost everyone on such a list. She received dozens of awards, but far fewer than she deserved, IMO. There would BE no "chip industry" without her. Pretty much everything else in our research field and our entire industry...is secondary.
Wikipedia tells me that IEEE Solid-State Circuits Magazine
published a special issue on her career in 2012. I didn't know
that, but it was well deserved. Her own reminiscences are worth reading -- every sentence.
https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/6392995
https://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/conway/Memoirs/VLSI/Lynn_Conway_VLSI_Reminiscences.pdf
We all owe her a tremendous debt. Write her name in the history books, and then go and pay it forward. I'll tell my Computer Architecture class and my quantum computing research group about her tomorrow. I didn't know her in person, but I probably won't be able to keep my eyes dry.
[written right after hearing about her passing, posted a couple of weeks later.]
[edit: obituaries:
