It’s hard to be a pioneer in one area, let alone three. But that’s the legacy of Lynn Conway, who passed away at 86 on Sunday. In addition to her engineering breakthroughs, she was a pioneer for women in tech and transgender people across the world.
Conway invented a new computing method after joining IBM in 1964, which is still used today. But her biggest impact came at Xerox in the late 70s. She co-wrote a groundbreaking textbook on microchip design that became standard reading in engineering and computer science programs, where it started a revolution of innovation among those who read it.
IBM fired Conway in 1968 after she became one of the first Americans to begin a modern version of gender transition, and she kept a low public profile through the rest of her career. But in 1999, she began telling her story not just to take credit for her accomplishments — without which, nearly every technology we use would not exist as we know it — but to chronicle others who had been sidelined by history and advocate for transgender issues in and outside of the tech industry.