Someone who invented technologies we use all the time passed away this month, and I wanted to tell you a bit about her, because she was really important and yet not well known even among us techies. Lynn Conway personally invented several of the technologies used in the chips in our smartphones back in the 1960s, when she worked at IBM. In 1968, IBM fired her. Not because of her work, which was superb -- but because she had made them aware of her intention to transition from her birth sex of male into the woman she had always felt she was. While society and the tech industry have come a long way since then, there are still far too many people -- especially, it has to be said, the older generations -- who say things like "everyone's transgender nowadays" and pretend that people feeling different to the box they were born into is somehow a new problem. Well, it isn't. Here's someone who transitioned more than 50 years ago, lived the rest of her life as the woman she always knew she was, and went on to have a spectacular career in spite of IBM's epic mistake, working at huge names including Xerox, Memorex and MIT. Sadly, to have that career, she had to keep her trans identity under wraps and pretend she'd been born female. She only came out when someone threatened to write a book about her in the late 90s. "From the 1970s to 1999 I was recognized as breaking the gender barrier in the computer science field as a woman, but in 2000 it became the transgender barrier I was breaking," she's quoted as saying to Forbes. From then on, she was a fierce activist for trans and women's rights, and in 2020 IBM not only apologised for firing her but gave her a Lifetime Achievement Award. Lynn died on the 9th of June this year. She leaves a legacy of not only amazing technological innovations that we still use today, but a clearer path for women and trans people to do the same. If those of us using her creations to make our living or enjoy our everyday lives end up achieving even a fraction as much as she did, we'll be very fortunate indeed. Thank you, Lynn -- I will remember you. en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynn…