If this is verified, I think a black band is 100% warranted. As I understand it, she was a real innovator in VLSI, which I think we all agree is somewhat important :)
While her contributions to the VLSI design methodologies are the best known and the most influential, that is because at that time she worked in academia, in plain sight.
She had another extremely important contribution much earlier, when working at IBM, at the Advanced Computer System project.
She invented the first methods that could be used for designing a CPU that can initiate multiple instructions in the same clock cycle and also out of order in comparison with the program. Such a CPU will be named only 2 decades later as a superscalar CPU (also inside IBM and by people familiar with the old ACS project). (The earlier CDC 6600 could initiate only 1 instruction per clock cycle, in program order, even if after initiation it could execute the instructions concurrently and complete them out-of-order, depending on the availability of execution units.)
Her work on superscalar CPUs did not become known until much later, because it was written in confidential internal reports about the ACS project, which was canceled, unlike the later and much less comprehensive work of Tomasulo, which was published in a journal and which was used in a commercial product, so it became the reference on out-of-order execution in the open literature, for several decades.
At the time when she worked at IBM, her legal gender was still male, and when she announced her intention of gender change, she was fired by IBM, which is likely to have contributed to the obscurity that covered her ACS work at IBM.
Her "Dynamic Instruction Scheduling" report from 1966 is mandatory reading for anyone who is interested about the evolution of the superscalar and out-of-order CPUs.
Fascinating. It wasn't long ago I did a high performance computer architecture grad class. They covered Tomasulo but no mention of Conway's contributions. TIL.
> all people deserve respect simply for being human, they shouldn't have to invent both superscalar architecture and VLSI design in one lifetime just to be treated politely.
Quite disappointing to hear; I know the feeling on discovering unfortunate things coworkers believe :(. I can scarcely imagine the feeling of seeing real progress happen on trans acceptance, only to then see a blowback coming, right at the end of your life. Glad she will be remembered positively.
Gaolers are sadists, is well established. The large amount of rape in prisons is due to guards sadism, (not all guards, not all gaols). Trans prisoners are no harder to deal with than any other class, but bigotry...
Ditto for refuges. There are a lot of troubles around refuges, trouble from trans women is just another set of troubles.
Professional sports, and record keeping in sports does seem to have a reasonable objection, if you accept the premise of competitive sport. (I could hardly care less about competitive sport, but I recognise it is a problem for them). A small part of our society, and a special case. So what.
But bigotry, and a totally bizarre interference in other people's personal lives.
I really do not get it.
What fabulous work trans men and women are doing breaking down the arcane tyranny of gender that is a major fault line through our whole society.
Anyone can sue anyone for nearly anything. Whether they can win or not is the more relevant question and it seems like Don has evidence that he's comfortable keeping in reserve and would prefer to call out poor behavior and fade the risk of a frivolous lawsuit rather than keeping quiet and safe.
EDIT: GG, the black band appeared as I sent this