- Joined
- Apr 22, 2022
Ho boy, I was wondering if this one would come up. Lynn Conway! 
Sorry just basking in this for a second.
Conway is the OG mental troon. He trooned out in the late 1960s and was one of Harry Benjamin's original guinea pigs.
Tony calls Conway "the transwoman computer scientist who pioneered supercomputers" and that he joined IBM and "pioneered the world's first supercomputer". This is, er, not true.
It's uncontroversial to call the Control Data 6600 the first supercomputer (roughly, a computer specialised for lots of number crunching, particularly, at that time, for physics simulations). The 6600 was made by Seymour Cray (yes, that Cray) and his team and released in 1964. The previous fastest computer was the IBM 7030 "Stretch" built for nuclear weapons simulations at Lawrence Livermore -- also arguably the first supercomputer but much more similar to typical mainframes than was the CDC 6600.
(Edit: My apologies, I originally mixed up the IBM 7030 “Stretch” and the 7950 “Harvest”. Harvest was the NSA machine and was derived from and very similar to Stretch. The point still stands — these were variations on existing mainframes and were eclipsed by the CDC 6600.)
All that is to say that, no, Conway did not pioneer supercomputers and cannot conceivably be claimed to have pioneered the world's first. He was part of IBM's ACS project, joining in 1965, but ACS was set up in response to CDC, and was shut down in 1968.
In the same sentence, Tony claims that Conway "pioneered … out-of-order processing". This one is more tricky. Certainly Conway claims to have been the first to come up with out-of-order execution (where the processor swaps instructions around to avoid waiting). The CDC 6600, again, included primitive out-of-order execution. Conway is not mentioned in regards to the first true out-of-order processor, the IBM System 360/91 released in 1968 -- a machine designed by an entirely different group at IBM.
There's also the "tree falls in the forest" problem. There are no contemporary papers by Conway about out-of-order execution, even though IBM researchers did publish (the System R paper was foundational for Oracle). Even if in 1965 Conway, "fresh out of grad school", came up with a supposedly viable out-of-order execution method, told no-one and influenced no-one, did he really "invent" it?
Tony's next claim is that while at Xerox (PARC), Conway "invented VLSI, which allows computers to be small enough to fit in your hand". Er, no.
What Carver Mead and Conway did was not invent VLSI, but write an influential textbook on handling the complexity of designing VLSI components. Very Large-Scale Integration is just a phrase that describes the shrinking of transistors (electronic switches) past the previous threshold of Large-Scale Integration (these are hand-wavy terms that have been abandoned). Helping engineers design with these very small, tightly packed components was important, but not in itself an invention. And small enough to fit in your hand? Well maybe Tony could fit a late 1970s computer in his meat mitt.
The most accurate thing Tony says in this video is that Conway became a transgender activist in the 2000s, so let's turn to that.
As the self-aggrandisement above shows, Conway is a shameless self-publicist. Compare for instance Conway's account of his career with that of his co-author Carver Mead. Most of this is contained on Conway's website (hosted by the University of Michigan), both tall tales about Conway's achievements and also an entire "TS" subsection (see also this 2003 directory listing as the site is badly put together).
The most infamous example of Conway's attempt to shore up his reputation is his vicious attack on sexologist J Michael Bailey and then bioethicist/historian Alice Dreger when Dreger investigated the attacks on Bailey.
I won't go through the entire controversy, as Alice Dreger's article on it is excellent. But in short, Bailey is a sexologist in the Blanchard mould, and conducted research on TIMs and wrote a book about it. StillTish wrote a very good three-part summary of the book, The Man Who Would Be Queen. Anyway, Bailey's book adds further weight to Blanchard's HSTS/AGP theory, and the trannies absolutely lose their shit. Suggest there is a sexual motivation behind MtF transition? You must be stopped at once.
With fellow troon Andrea James, Conway cooked up a nutcase conspiracy chart (below) and devoted his time to trying to ruin Bailey's professional and personal lives. Conway started making trips to Chicago to pressure the TIMs who appeared (pseudonymously) in Bailey's book to file complaints with his employer, Northwestern University, and Conway himself filed complaints with Northwestern. Conway allegedly also paid one TIM to complain to Northwestern that Bailey had an improper sexual relationship with the TIM. Conway further made complaints to Illinois authorities that Bailey was supposedly practising clinical psychology without a license. When the book was nominated for a Lambda Literary Foundation award, Conway deluged the foundation with complaints and targeted individual award judges. Conway made physical threats against Bailey through a colleague. Conway wrote directly to Bailey's Northwestern colleagues to slander him.
But these little snippets really do not do justice to the truly unhinged campaign that Conway and his tranny mates conducted against Bailey. One of Conway's pals, Andrea James, posted pictures online of Bailey's "children with their eyes blacked out, asking whether his young daughter was “a cock-starved exhibitionist, or a paraphiliac who just gets off on the idea of it?”" So please do read Dreger's article if you haven't before. It's long but it's worth it.
So yes, well done Tony, an actual troon this time. A complete charlatan who has rewritten his history wholesale to look like a technology pioneer that he was not, and who in recent years conducted a desperate, underhand campaign against a researcher who wrote a book that he disagreed with.
Btw Tony you look very ill. Are you getting enough iron?
Sorry just basking in this for a second.
Conway is the OG mental troon. He trooned out in the late 1960s and was one of Harry Benjamin's original guinea pigs.
Tony calls Conway "the transwoman computer scientist who pioneered supercomputers" and that he joined IBM and "pioneered the world's first supercomputer". This is, er, not true.
It's uncontroversial to call the Control Data 6600 the first supercomputer (roughly, a computer specialised for lots of number crunching, particularly, at that time, for physics simulations). The 6600 was made by Seymour Cray (yes, that Cray) and his team and released in 1964. The previous fastest computer was the IBM 7030 "Stretch" built for nuclear weapons simulations at Lawrence Livermore -- also arguably the first supercomputer but much more similar to typical mainframes than was the CDC 6600.
(Edit: My apologies, I originally mixed up the IBM 7030 “Stretch” and the 7950 “Harvest”. Harvest was the NSA machine and was derived from and very similar to Stretch. The point still stands — these were variations on existing mainframes and were eclipsed by the CDC 6600.)
All that is to say that, no, Conway did not pioneer supercomputers and cannot conceivably be claimed to have pioneered the world's first. He was part of IBM's ACS project, joining in 1965, but ACS was set up in response to CDC, and was shut down in 1968.
In the same sentence, Tony claims that Conway "pioneered … out-of-order processing". This one is more tricky. Certainly Conway claims to have been the first to come up with out-of-order execution (where the processor swaps instructions around to avoid waiting). The CDC 6600, again, included primitive out-of-order execution. Conway is not mentioned in regards to the first true out-of-order processor, the IBM System 360/91 released in 1968 -- a machine designed by an entirely different group at IBM.
There's also the "tree falls in the forest" problem. There are no contemporary papers by Conway about out-of-order execution, even though IBM researchers did publish (the System R paper was foundational for Oracle). Even if in 1965 Conway, "fresh out of grad school", came up with a supposedly viable out-of-order execution method, told no-one and influenced no-one, did he really "invent" it?
Tony's next claim is that while at Xerox (PARC), Conway "invented VLSI, which allows computers to be small enough to fit in your hand". Er, no.
What Carver Mead and Conway did was not invent VLSI, but write an influential textbook on handling the complexity of designing VLSI components. Very Large-Scale Integration is just a phrase that describes the shrinking of transistors (electronic switches) past the previous threshold of Large-Scale Integration (these are hand-wavy terms that have been abandoned). Helping engineers design with these very small, tightly packed components was important, but not in itself an invention. And small enough to fit in your hand? Well maybe Tony could fit a late 1970s computer in his meat mitt.
The most accurate thing Tony says in this video is that Conway became a transgender activist in the 2000s, so let's turn to that.
As the self-aggrandisement above shows, Conway is a shameless self-publicist. Compare for instance Conway's account of his career with that of his co-author Carver Mead. Most of this is contained on Conway's website (hosted by the University of Michigan), both tall tales about Conway's achievements and also an entire "TS" subsection (see also this 2003 directory listing as the site is badly put together).
The most infamous example of Conway's attempt to shore up his reputation is his vicious attack on sexologist J Michael Bailey and then bioethicist/historian Alice Dreger when Dreger investigated the attacks on Bailey.
I won't go through the entire controversy, as Alice Dreger's article on it is excellent. But in short, Bailey is a sexologist in the Blanchard mould, and conducted research on TIMs and wrote a book about it. StillTish wrote a very good three-part summary of the book, The Man Who Would Be Queen. Anyway, Bailey's book adds further weight to Blanchard's HSTS/AGP theory, and the trannies absolutely lose their shit. Suggest there is a sexual motivation behind MtF transition? You must be stopped at once.
With fellow troon Andrea James, Conway cooked up a nutcase conspiracy chart (below) and devoted his time to trying to ruin Bailey's professional and personal lives. Conway started making trips to Chicago to pressure the TIMs who appeared (pseudonymously) in Bailey's book to file complaints with his employer, Northwestern University, and Conway himself filed complaints with Northwestern. Conway allegedly also paid one TIM to complain to Northwestern that Bailey had an improper sexual relationship with the TIM. Conway further made complaints to Illinois authorities that Bailey was supposedly practising clinical psychology without a license. When the book was nominated for a Lambda Literary Foundation award, Conway deluged the foundation with complaints and targeted individual award judges. Conway made physical threats against Bailey through a colleague. Conway wrote directly to Bailey's Northwestern colleagues to slander him.
But these little snippets really do not do justice to the truly unhinged campaign that Conway and his tranny mates conducted against Bailey. One of Conway's pals, Andrea James, posted pictures online of Bailey's "children with their eyes blacked out, asking whether his young daughter was “a cock-starved exhibitionist, or a paraphiliac who just gets off on the idea of it?”" So please do read Dreger's article if you haven't before. It's long but it's worth it.
So yes, well done Tony, an actual troon this time. A complete charlatan who has rewritten his history wholesale to look like a technology pioneer that he was not, and who in recent years conducted a desperate, underhand campaign against a researcher who wrote a book that he disagreed with.
Btw Tony you look very ill. Are you getting enough iron?
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