In 1968, a researcher on IBM’s ACS project was fired. Her name was left off the work she had done: a technique that let several instructions run at once outside their planned order, and which today sits inside almost every high-performance processor in the world.
The idea went on without her. For decades, nobody knew it was hers.
She started again under another name, and did it again: she co-wrote the book from which a whole generation learnt to design circuits.
IBM apologised in 2020.
Her name was Lynn Conway.
“If you want to change the future, just start living as if you are already there.”
Lynn Conway, Columbia University, 2016
These words closed the drafts of The Book of Alessandra for years. That is why the series begins with her.
Read the whole story, with its sources →
Other Alessandras: real works that were left under someone else’s name, or no name at all, and how it was later found out whose they were.