Saturday, July 19, 2025

Story Post: Key Engineer in VLSI Advancement Nominated

Lynn Conway, a computer scientist who pioneered VLSI for microchips that powers current electronics in the 1970s; is nominated for IBM Lifetime Achievement Awards. She was working with IBM at the start of her career; but was fired by then-IBM’s CEO as IBM was alerted of Conway’s gender transition. In 1977; Conway wrote the book Introduction to VLSI Systems and taught a lecture about it, which began the Mead-Conway VLSI revolution. In August 2020; IBM, in an online event apologized for its firing of Conway and awarded Conway with IBM Lifetime Achievement Award.

posted by JonathanDark at 19 Jul 2025 13:26:00 UTC Comments (2)

Comments

Josh: he/they

19-07-2025 17:15:47 UTC

My base level reward for this is quite high. It’s tempered a bit by the use of VLSI, an acronym in itself that obviously hides a bunch of other words - an acronym inside an acronym is obviously untidy. The way I wanted to resolve that was by assessing whether VLSI is a common enough acronym that it functions as a word autonomously - like laser or AWOL or NASA - something that would largely not need explaining. Having asked around, I think it isn’t unless you are very much in the correct field - a slightly adjacent field is insufficient. So we’re landing somewhere in the middle. Score 3. Good effort.

Chiiika: she/her

19-07-2025 17:19:24 UTC

Anything that isn’t war related would be 4+. Score 4; “VLSI”.

You must be logged in as a player to post comments.