Wednesday, February 20, 2013
Meeting Lynn Conway
Christine Burns
http://blog.plain-sense.co.uk/2013/02/meeting-lynn-conway.htmlI can clearly remember the evening in late 1999 when the very first email from Professor Lynn Conway plopped into my inbox.
[...]
It was the beginning of a long association from afar.
It was an association which, after all these years, I was finally able to turn into a face to face meeting two weeks ago whilst passing through Chicago.
In our first exchanges Lynn explained how the decision to "come out" and explain about both her hidden career history and her transsexual past was prompted by the realisation that other engineers and journalists were beginning to display an interest in projects she had been associated with at the computer giant IBM in the mid to late 1960's.
Rather than face the possibility of people discovering her work and then tracking her down in some grand exposé, in a way she wouldn't be able to control, Lynn had made the calculation that it was better to seize the initiative, and explain her work to the researchers. It was a chance, finally, to step up to claim her part in a supercomputer project that was cancelled, and for her to explain an important invention which had then been buried by events until being 'reinvented' many years later.
