Lynn Conway, who ushered in a computer revolution by helping reimagine microchip design — and who remained on the cutting edge for decades, challenging ignorance and prejudice in science when she publicly came out as a transgender woman late in her career — died June 9 at a hospital in Jackson, Mich. She was 86.
The cause was complications from congestive heart failure, said her husband, Charles Rogers.
An electrical engineer whose interests extended from semiconductors and superscalar processors to motocross racing, mountain climbing and white-water canoeing, Ms. Conway literally wrote the book on microchip design.
While working at Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center in the late 1970s, she and a colleague, Carver Mead, developed and codified a new method for creating chips. The two were co-authors of a textbook that taught students how to arrange ever more transistors on ever tinier integrated circuits.
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Published by Addison-Wesley in 1980, “Introduction to VLSI Systems” became a go-to manual for engineers learning about very-large-scale integration, or VLSI. The design technique fueled the development of cheaper, more powerful microprocessors at the heart of laptops and smartphones, and was presented in a way that allowed novice engineers to design microchips of their own, instead of relying on a few major manufacturers.
“My field would not exist without Lynn Conway,” said Valeria Bertacco, a computer science and engineering professor at the University of Michigan, where Ms. Conway taught for more than a decade.
“Chips used to be designed by drawing them with paper and pencil like an architect’s blueprints in the pre-digital era,” she added in a tribute for the university. “Conway’s work developed algorithms that enabled our field to use software to arrange millions, and later billions, of transistors on a chip.”
For decades, Ms. Conway’s contributions were largely overlooked, overshadowed at times by those of her male counterpart, Mead, who had studied the issue of chip design for years before partnering with her at Xerox PARC. While Mead was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2009, hailed with helping develop the standards and principles behind VLSI, it wasn’t until last year that Ms. Conway joined him in the hall, which credited her with the same invention.
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By then, the shift their work brought about had been dubbed “the Mead-Conway revolution,” although Ms. Conway and others said that the names could have easily been reversed.
“Mead probably thinks it was 80/20 him,” she told the Independent newspaper last year. “Most people, I think, in the long term, will find it was really 80/20 me.”
However you divvied up credit, Mead said, her contributions were undeniable.
“Without her leadership,” he told the Independent, “I think the VLSI revolution would have taken much longer.”
In part, Ms. Conway acknowledged, she had avoided the spotlight intentionally, living in “stealth mode” for fear that her gender identity would wreck her career. It had already cost her her job once, when she was fired from IBM in 1968 after confiding to managers that she was planning to undergo gender-confirmation surgery, a then-novel procedure that she had to travel to Mexico to receive.
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“In many jurisdictions, I could have been arrested and charged as a sex offender — or, worse yet, institutionalized and forced to undergo electroshock therapy in a mental hospital,” she wrote in a 2013 essay for HuffPost.
“Evading those fates, I completed my transition and began building a career in a secret new identity, starting at the bottom of the ladder as a contract programmer. Even then, any ‘outing’ could have led to media exposure, and I’d have become unemployable, out on the streets for good.”
“I covered my past for over 30 years,” she added, “always looking over my shoulder, as if a foreign spy in my own country.”
By 2000, she had decided to begin telling her story — including discussing her early research contributions at IBM, which had been lost to history because they were credited under her long-discarded birth name. She started speaking to reporters, including for a nearly 8,000-word cover story in the Los Angeles Times Magazine, and created a personal website where she aimed to offer “information, encouragement and hope” to others who had transitioned or were in the process of doing so.
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“Her website was a vital resource for trans women quietly transitioning in the 1990s and 2000s, before it was safe to come out,” said Mary Ann Horton, a transgender activist and computer scientist. Ms. Conway, she added in an email interview, “spotlighted dozens of successful trans women and trans men, inspiring newly emerging trans people to realize they too could successfully transition.”
Ms. Conway also published a multipart autobiographical essay on her website, detailing her early struggles to find support from friends and family members. She showed little bitterness about those years, including when it came to her firing from IBM, an episode that forced her and her family — at the time, she was married and had two young daughters — to live on welfare for three months.
In 2020, she was moved to tears when IBM called her back for a meeting more than 50 years after her ouster, delivering a formal apology to her as some 1,200 employees watched online.
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“For me personally, it brings a lot of closure,” she told the Times afterward.
“People need resolution,” she added, “but you can’t go back in space and time and judge those by the techno-social standards of today. There are ways of not carrying hate and vendettas, but to be able to historically recognize exactly what happened, and then take away the lessons that any one of us can share about how to avoid entrapping oneself in a similar situation that might be judged in the future.
“It isn’t really about me. I’m just a messenger.”
The older of two children, Lynn Ann Conway was born in Mount Vernon, N.Y., on Jan. 2, 1938. Her mother was a schoolteacher, and her father worked in New York City as a chemical engineer for Texaco. They divorced when Ms. Conway was 7.
By then, she recalled in the autobiographical essay, she felt “terrible angst” over her assigned gender identity — male — and her parents’ insistence that dresses and play dates with female friends were not for her.
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“You are not a girl!” her mother shouted, in what Ms. Conway described as “one of my earliest memories of feeling sheer terror.”
School became a refuge. She developed an interest in science and engineering, building her own hi-fi sound system and, as a teenager in White Plains, N.Y., constructing her own radio telescope, 12 feet in diameter. She went on to study physics at MIT, where according to the Times she began taking estrogen injections (procured through acquaintances who were burgling pharmacies) and came out to a few friends as trans.
Yet she found little social or psychological support, she said, and began drinking heavily. She flunked out of school and moved to San Francisco, looking for a refuge in the city’s more progressive gay community. She later moved back in with her mother, taking a job as a technician at a hearing-aid company.
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Eventually, she regained her footing and enrolled at Columbia University, earning bachelor’s and master’s degrees in electrical engineering in 1962 and 1963, respectively, after only two years of study.
Through one of her instructors, she landed a job at IBM, where she joined a research team, code-named Project Y, working to build a new super-fast computer out of an office in Menlo Park, Calif. The supercomputer design was never completed, but the project was credited with making technological advances that were used to improve computer speed and performance.
Ms. Conway was married by then and still publicly identified as male. But by 1968, she had resolved to transition and contacted a New York endocrinologist, pioneering physician Harry Benjamin, to help with her medical care. When she revealed the news to one of her managers, she explained that she was doing it “to resolve a terrible existential situation I had faced since childhood.”
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Her bosses at IBM initially supported her decision, developing a plan in which she would quietly transfer to another division of the company with a new identity, enabling her to start fresh. Executives ultimately decided that “this simply wasn’t the IBM image,” as her supervisor later told the Times.
The company feared “scandalous publicity,” Ms. Conway recalled, and worried that her colleagues “might suffer major emotional problems” after learning about her transition. She underwent the surgery soon after her firing.
Ms. Conway’s marriage faltered, ending in divorce, and she was barred by her ex-wife from seeing their children. Under a new name — Conway came from the surname of a spunky heroine in a Helen MacInnes adventure novel — she restarted her career, working at Memorex before taking a job at Xerox PARC in 1973.
Before long, she began working with Mead, an outside consultant with a faculty position at Caltech. While he theorized about the design of a new kind of microchip, she offered the practical know-how to help them get it done.
“I had never designed a computer,” he later said. “She had.”
Ms. Conway found the work exhilarating, recalling an exuberant period when, after years of turmoil, she felt a “complete resonance with the universe.”
Her research also impressed the Pentagon, leading to a job running a supercomputer program at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA. (The background check went so smoothly, she said, that she concluded she was far from the first transgender employee at the Pentagon.)
Ms. Conway joined the University of Michigan College of Engineering in 1985, serving as associate dean for instruction and instructional technology. She retired from the school in 1998 as a professor emerita of electrical engineering and computer science.
Away from the classroom, she rode motorcycles and canoed with her husband, Rogers, a fellow engineer she married in 2002. In addition to her husband, survivors include her two daughters and several grandchildren and great-grandchildren.
Ms. Conway continued to publish articles in recent years, advocating for transgender rights and women in science and engineering. By 2018, she had developed a concept she called “the Conway Effect,” to explain the years in which her contributions seemed to have been mostly forgotten.
“People tend to be blind to innovations made by ‘others,’ or those they don’t expect to make innovations,” she wrote in an article for Computer magazine. “People usually don’t notice when something that has never been done before is happening right in front of their eyes.”
