naim@accuvax.nwu.edu (Naim Abdullah) (07/21/88)
There has been some discussion going on about wizards who happen
to be women. I would like to mention:
1) Mary Shaw: I think, now running the Software Engineering Institute
at CMU. Jon Bentley relates an interesting anecdote about her in
his book "Writing Efficient Programs". I am quoting from the book
without permission (on page 78):
"Shaw's experience also provides an example of the power of program
monitoring. She was led to the above modification during a discussion
with a user about the value of displaying the program counter on
the console lights during program execution. The user did not see the
merit in this, so he and Shaw observed the lights during the execution
of one of his time-consuming programs. When they did so, they found
that much of the time was spent in the operating system, and inspection
of the commonly executed code revealed that the only operating system
primitives he used were SAVE and UNSAVE [for saving and restoring
registers according to a passed bitstring]. Patching his code to exploit
the special case of operating on all registers immediately reduced his
program's run time by thirty percent. If Shaw could achieve such
speedups in 1964 by staring at the console lights, just think of the
speedups that can be achieved using more sophisticated monitoring tools!"
I don't know about you, but *I* was impressed. Incidentally, I would
recommend Bentley's book, very nicely written and useful, with lots
of war stories about many famous people in Computer Science (example:
dmr speeded up a macro processor by a factor of 4 by writing procedure
calls inline [I wonder if he is talking about the UNIX program m4 ?]).
2) Lynn Conway: The author (with Carver Mead) of "Introduction to VLSI
systems". This book became a classic almost overnight and was instrumental
in spreading Conway & Mead's VLSI design methodology to the engineering
community. She developed this material while at Xerox PARC and taught the
first course at MIT on it. She is one of the primary people who got
MOSIS started [MOSIS is a chip fabrication service by DARPA, whereby
students in a university course send their paper designs via the
ARPAnet to a chip foundary which fabricates all the student designs
and returns the chips by Snail mail a couple of months later].
I think Lynn Conway is now a professor (and Dean) at University of
Michigan at Ann Arbor. There was an article about her in IEEE
Spectrum last year.
3) Barbara Liskov: Well known professor at MIT, who publishes in the
area of "atomic transactions". Pick up most any conference on
operating systems and you are bound to find a paper by her. I think,
she was also involved in the design of CLU ? (I am not sure about this
point)
4) Lorinda Cherry: Is the author (with Brian Kernighan) of the UNIX
program eqn. This program accepts specification of equations in an
easy format and issues the appropriate troff commands to typeset
them. If you use troff for typesetting, you are probably using eqn
for your math equations. A person who can tame troff like this, is
a wizard in my book. Does anybody know if Lorinda Cherry is still
at Bell Labs ?
Let's hear more examples of unsung wizards out there, who happen
to be women!!
Naim Abdullah
Dept. of EECS,
Northwestern University
Internet: naim@eecs.nwu.edu
Uucp: {oddjob, chinet, att}!nucsrl!naim