Lynn Conway invented a breakthrough that shaped modern computing, then spent 30 years watching IBM get the credit while she stayed hidden
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I’m so glad you told us about her
Conway’s specific contribution, a method called dynamic instruction scheduling
Both very important for performance and also at fault for most of the CPU exploits discovered in recent (maybe less recent now) years a la Spectre, Meltdown (though I’m not sure if her early version of out-of-order execution featured branch prediction like the CPUs that were found exploitable or only went ahead of schedule when the results were independent)
I’ve always wondered how someone chooses to work for Nazis, and learns the hardway they were going to steal from you.
