Lynn Conway: How An Intelligent Young Boy Overcame

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Robert was an intelligent boy who had the ability to come up with an idea, create a plan, and build a project from a young age. He built an enlarger for his brother’s photography hobby as well as a radio and hi-fi system. 1 At 12 Robert designed and built a Radio Telescope.2 However, Robert was never happy as a young boy. He wished he could dress as a girl and enjoyed spending time with the girls, playing dolls and house. 3 Robert would grow up to be one of the most prominent women in computer engineering. Robert struggled with his identity through college. He often dressed as a woman outside of class. He called the female version of himself Lynn.4 Robert started taking hormones to become more feminine during his time at MIT. Robert’s inner struggle became too much and he dropped out of MIT and went to San Francisco searching for comfort in the gay community.5 However, Robert did not consider himself gay. He considered himself a woman. Robert became bored in San Francisco and enrolled in school at Columbia. He earned both his both bachelors and masters degrees in electrical engineering in two years.6 While at Columbia he married and had two children. He was stuck in a family as a father, as a man. His intellectual prowess landed him a job at IBM working on the secret project, “Project Y”. 7 Project Y was a team of engineers assembled to work on the world’s first supercomputer.8 Computers of the day were very large and only useful for crunching numbers. Project Y’s task was to create a computer that was much faster, much more powerful, and able to perform more than one task at a time. Robert solved this vexing problem with a design he called DIS (dynamic instruction scheduling), DIS was able to perform multiple tasks while keeping the number of expensive transistors used to a minimum.9 However, as Robert’s

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