Monday, June 24, 2024

Lynn Conway

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:

]

Tuesday, June 04, 2024

Gordon Bell



 Gordon Bell has passed away.

Gordon was one of the most important computer architects of all time. He designed, co-designed or was executive lead in charge of most of Digital Equipment Corporation's key machines in its heyday, from the initial PDP-1 to the VAX-11, in two stints working for the company. Although he wrote the seminal description of the PDP-11, perhaps the most influential minicomputer of all time, I don't think he had much to do with that design or with the PDP-10, and by the time of the Alpha he had already left DEC for good. But still, much of the company's design sensibilities grew from him.

I learned a great deal from the book he coauthored on computer engineering, using all of the DEC machines as examples. Most of the chapters were coauthored by Gordon and other members of the various technical teams. (Wow, I paid ten bucks for my copy at a DECUS in 1986, but even the Kindle version now goes for a hundred bucks?!?)

He also established the Gordon Bell Prize for accomplishments in parallel computing. One of the recent prizes was for simulation of quantum mechanics, though nothing to do with quantum computing.

RIP Gordon, thanks for the machines and for being such an important advocate of parallel computing.