Thank you for sharing those details, I didn't know that. I learned and grew so much by reading Lynn's autobiography, but there's so much in there and it's so deep and personal, that it's hard to get my head around how amazing and difficult a life she had, and details like that help.
I was researching some of the names that Alan Kay mentioned in his classic paper about the history of Smalltalk and his 1993 interview with Yoot Saito, and discovered another amazingly accomplished trans woman at Xerox PARC, Diana Merry-Shapiro, who co-invented BitBlt, and wrote one of the first systems for overlapping windows for Smalltalk, and the Smalltalk code editor.
A member of the Learning Research Group, she significantly contributed to the development, testing, and application of the Smalltalk system, focusing on educational technology and learning methodologies. Her involvement was pivotal in integrating and refining the BitBLT graphics operation, enhancing the system's capabilities in graphical manipulation and display.
>The second half of the reunion event reunited members of Alan Kay’s Learning Research Group. After a brief introductory video featuring Diana Merry-Shapiro and her memories of what she worked on at PARC, Dave Robson hosted a discussion with Dan Ingalls, Ted Kaehler, and Glenn Krasner.
Dr. Vanessa Freudenberg is another amazing successful trans woman programmer in the Smalltalk world who's done all kinds of groundbreaking work with Alan Kay, Smalltalk, Squeak, SqueakJS, Viewpoints Research, Croquet, Harc, OLPC, and is quite open and extremely happy about her transition in 2020.
Here’s Yoot Saito’s 1993 interview with Alan Kay, when he was visiting Japan with Douglass Engelbart, and Yoot was working for MacWorld Japan. He also has interviews with Douglass Engelbart, Joanna Hoffman, Steve Wozniak, and Bill Atkinson that I hope to dig up and publish, since they were only published decades ago in Japan.
Here's Alan Kay's history of Smalltalk paper that Brett Victor put online in html, and I'm working on transcribing and formatting the appendices that are missing from that.
Without wishing to categorize all of these important woman into the same story, another key trans figure in early personal computing is Sophie Wilson[1], who co-designed the ARM instruction set (and, as important for many, designed the OS for the BBC Microcomputer, including the font).
Honestly, yeah -- it's not a cheat code, it's facing two sets of pressures from discrimination, not seeing many like you in your field, what you deal with outside of the workplace, etc. And it helped me to see how many people before me succeeded regardless of all that; learning about Lynn Conway ~15 years ago was really important to me.
I was researching some of the names that Alan Kay mentioned in his classic paper about the history of Smalltalk and his 1993 interview with Yoot Saito, and discovered another amazingly accomplished trans woman at Xerox PARC, Diana Merry-Shapiro, who co-invented BitBlt, and wrote one of the first systems for overlapping windows for Smalltalk, and the Smalltalk code editor.
https://github.com/YootTowerManagement/YootTower/blob/main/Y...
Diana Merry-Shapiro (Xerox PARC):
A member of the Learning Research Group, she significantly contributed to the development, testing, and application of the Smalltalk system, focusing on educational technology and learning methodologies. Her involvement was pivotal in integrating and refining the BitBLT graphics operation, enhancing the system's capabilities in graphical manipulation and display.
Diana Merry
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diana_Merry
SMALLTALK AT 50
https://computerhistory.org/blog/smalltalk-at-50/
>The second half of the reunion event reunited members of Alan Kay’s Learning Research Group. After a brief introductory video featuring Diana Merry-Shapiro and her memories of what she worked on at PARC, Dave Robson hosted a discussion with Dan Ingalls, Ted Kaehler, and Glenn Krasner.
Oral History of Diana Merry Shapiro
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5sTUaO3PNkQ
Casa Susanna:
https://www.hammertonail.com/reviews/casa-susanna/
Review: ‘Casa Susanna,’ starring Katherine Cummings, Diana Merry-Shapiro, Betsy Wollheim and Gregory Bagarozy:
https://culturemixonline.com/review-casa-susanna-starring-ka...
Dr. Vanessa Freudenberg is another amazing successful trans woman programmer in the Smalltalk world who's done all kinds of groundbreaking work with Alan Kay, Smalltalk, Squeak, SqueakJS, Viewpoints Research, Croquet, Harc, OLPC, and is quite open and extremely happy about her transition in 2020.
https://www.freudenbergs.de/bert/
Here’s Yoot Saito’s 1993 interview with Alan Kay, when he was visiting Japan with Douglass Engelbart, and Yoot was working for MacWorld Japan. He also has interviews with Douglass Engelbart, Joanna Hoffman, Steve Wozniak, and Bill Atkinson that I hope to dig up and publish, since they were only published decades ago in Japan.
https://github.com/YootTowerManagement/YootTower/blob/main/Y...
Here's Alan Kay's history of Smalltalk paper that Brett Victor put online in html, and I'm working on transcribing and formatting the appendices that are missing from that.
https://worrydream.com/EarlyHistoryOfSmalltalk/