IBM Apologizes for Firing Computer Pioneer for Being Transgender 52 Years Later

Yeah... This is the same company that gutted the careers of thousands (possibly tens of thousands) of employees because they had grown too old (and thus too expensive) to make room for a cadre of young, cheap and very pliant employees in India. It's easy to apologize to Lynn Conway but it takes real guts to make amends for the horrible ageism IBM has perpetrated.

Conway seems like a class act who in addition to being a mind of the highest intellect and immense work ethic does not seem to hold the slightest grudge on what befell her, her career and her family due to IBM's actions.

One virtual event, a heartfelt apology by the HR flack, an award to Conway and all is good? I dunno. This feels like a day late, a dollar short. IBM should do a lot more. A lot lot more.

Forget IBM - PARC was clearly the place to be in the 1970s! It's astonishing how many amazing things came out of PARC in that era - basically the blueprints some 40+ years of modern computing, short of the internet.

And where would we be without (Mead &) Conway's pioneering VLSI textbook (and associated courses using it) that fueled the chip revolutions of the 1980s?

I understand that Butler Lampson, in the '80s, was firmly opposed to propagating Conway's VLSI design methods, but have not been able to discover why. Fortunately his opposition did not carry the day, and they turned that world upside down very quickly. But I still would like to know; he hasn't often been wrong.

>Thomas J. Watson, Jr., who fired Conway

like father, like son. Thomas J. Watson senior received Merit Cross of the German Eagle with Star from Hitler for helping with the holocaust. https://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/item.aspx?num=34689

Here chilling with Hitler https://www.computerhistory.org/revolution/punched-cards/2/1...