this post was submitted on 12 Jun 2024
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I have mixed feelings on the pronoun use, but having read some of her autobiographical writing I don't think she would have taken much issue with it. This piece is more focused on her work in computer engineering, so I felt it was appropriate to post here.

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 months ago (1 children)

There's some weirdness on that because she did some important but not-very-public work at IBM in the 60s with their ACS/"Project Y" effort that did what we later call superscalar/multi-issue processors like ...20 years before those terms existed. As part of that she wrote a paper about "Dynamic Instruction Scheduling" in 1966 under her pre-transition identity that is a like retroactive first cause for a bunch of computer architecture ideas.

There was almost nothing about that work in public until Mark Smotherman was doing some history of computing work in the late 90s, put out a call for information about it, and she produced a huge trove of insider information after deciding it was worth exposing the provenance. There's a neat long-form LATimes piece about the situation which is probably the primary source for the history in OP's link.

[–] PumaStoleMyBluff 3 points 5 months ago (1 children)

The 2000 long-form piece and yesterday's obituary posted by OP are written by the same person, Michael Hiltzik

[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 months ago

...I probably should have checked the byline before posting. It does still come from the same material, just a little more directly.