A 16-page printed comic that tells the story of Lynn Conway's groundbreaking invention of Very Large-Scale Integration (VLSI) that enablies today's billion-transistor chips, and the birth of the foundry model that separates chip design and printing.
Lines in the Sand is the story of Lynn Conway’s invention of Very-Large Scale Integration (VLSI), the design methodology that makes today’s billion-transistor silicon chips possible.
Born in New York in 1938, at age seventeen Conway went to M.I.T. to study physics. Excelling for three years, she abandoned her studies in her senior year due to severe gender dysphoria – later earning her BS and MS degrees in electrical engineering at Columbia University.
On graduating, Conway landed her dream job at IBM Research. Part of a team designing a new supercomputer, she invented “Dynamic Instruction Scheduling”, an innovative hardware technique still used in many of today’s powerful microprocessors.
In 1968, Conway was fired by IBM after revealing she was undergoing gender transition. Starting from scratch and living in stealth mode under a new name, her career blossomed. Five years later, she was offered a research position at Xerox PARC. It was here, in the late 1970’s, that she invented the microchip design methodology that changed the world.
The words were crafted by Jim Boulton and Lynn Conway between March and November 2023. The images were created using the generative artificial intelligence software ‘Midjourney’, fittingly, a technology only made possible by conway’s breakthrough.
Midjourney, and many other generative A.I. systems, are trained on the same database of five billion images harvested from the web. It became obvious over the course of Boulton and Conway’s collaboration, that the societal biases that tainted microchip design history persist in A.I. today. Mark Twain’s axiom “Never let the truth get in the way of a good story” no longer holds true. Today’s stories are tomorrow’s training data. accuracy and adherence to the facts need to be the default setting.
However, this comic’s author is optimistic. By examining a broader section of the historical record than has previously been possible, perhaps A.I. can offer an alternative to the distortions that result from history defined by dominant voices of the time. More voices, especially from those that historically have been marginalised, can only be a good thing.
© Jim Boulton 2024
