this post was submitted on 12 Jun 2024
458 points (93.4% liked)

Technology

59179 readers
2130 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.


Our Rules


  1. Follow the lemmy.world rules.
  2. Only tech related content.
  3. Be excellent to each another!
  4. Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
  5. Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
  6. Politics threads may be removed.
  7. No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
  8. Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
  9. Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots


founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

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.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] PAPPP@lemmy.sdf.org 3 points 4 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@lemmy.world 3 points 4 months ago (1 children)

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

[–] PAPPP@lemmy.sdf.org 3 points 4 months ago

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