If this is verified, I think a black band is 100% warranted. As I understand it, she was a real innovator in VLSI, which I think we all agree is somewhat important :)
While her contributions to the VLSI design methodologies are the best known and the most influential, that is because at that time she worked in academia, in plain sight.
She had another extremely important contribution much earlier, when working at IBM, at the Advanced Computer System project.
She invented the first methods that could be used for designing a CPU that can initiate multiple instructions in the same clock cycle and also out of order in comparison with the program. Such a CPU will be named only 2 decades later as a superscalar CPU (also inside IBM and by people familiar with the old ACS project). (The earlier CDC 6600 could initiate only 1 instruction per clock cycle, in program order, even if after initiation it could execute the instructions concurrently and complete them out-of-order, depending on the availability of execution units.)
Her work on superscalar CPUs did not become known until much later, because it was written in confidential internal reports about the ACS project, which was canceled, unlike the later and much less comprehensive work of Tomasulo, which was published in a journal and which was used in a commercial product, so it became the reference on out-of-order execution in the open literature, for several decades.
At the time when she worked at IBM, her legal gender was still male, and when she announced her intention of gender change, she was fired by IBM, which is likely to have contributed to the obscurity that covered her ACS work at IBM.
Her "Dynamic Instruction Scheduling" report from 1966 is mandatory reading for anyone who is interested about the evolution of the superscalar and out-of-order CPUs.
Fascinating. It wasn't long ago I did a high performance computer architecture grad class. They covered Tomasulo but no mention of Conway's contributions. TIL.
She had another extremely important contribution much earlier, when working at IBM, at the Advanced Computer System project.
She invented the first methods that could be used for designing a CPU that can initiate multiple instructions in the same clock cycle and also out of order in comparison with the program. Such a CPU will be named only 2 decades later as a superscalar CPU (also inside IBM and by people familiar with the old ACS project). (The earlier CDC 6600 could initiate only 1 instruction per clock cycle, in program order, even if after initiation it could execute the instructions concurrently and complete them out-of-order, depending on the availability of execution units.)
Her work on superscalar CPUs did not become known until much later, because it was written in confidential internal reports about the ACS project, which was canceled, unlike the later and much less comprehensive work of Tomasulo, which was published in a journal and which was used in a commercial product, so it became the reference on out-of-order execution in the open literature, for several decades.
At the time when she worked at IBM, her legal gender was still male, and when she announced her intention of gender change, she was fired by IBM, which is likely to have contributed to the obscurity that covered her ACS work at IBM.
Her "Dynamic Instruction Scheduling" report from 1966 is mandatory reading for anyone who is interested about the evolution of the superscalar and out-of-order CPUs.
https://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/conway/ACS/Archive/ACSarchi...