Conway Suchman Conversation Conway-Suchman conversation Lynn Conway, Lucy Suchman Published on: Mar 05, 2021 License: Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC-BY 4.0) Conway Suchman Conversation Conway-Suchman conversation Preface by Lucy Suchman, 28 February 2021 In 1980, at Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), we entered into a rather extraordinary conversation. Computer architect and electrical engineer Lynn was then head of the LSI (Large-Scale Integration) Systems area at PARC, while I was a recently arrived Research Intern at PARC and PhD student in Anthropology at the University of California at Berkeley, in the very early stages of formulating plans for my doctoral thesis. Lynn was emerging from a period of intensive activity focused on the ‘multi-university, multi-project chip-design demonstration’ (MPC79), an initiative involving the creation of a new pedagogy and associated design and manufacturing process for the production of very large-scale integrated circuits (VLSI). At Lynn’s suggestion, we began an exchange born out of her desire to think anthropologically about what she had just experienced, and mine to deepen my understanding of her sociotechnical imaginary and practice. With Lynn’s endorsement, I recorded and transcribed our conversations, aided by an Alto computer and the text editor Bravo, both recently developed and in everyday use at PARC. The resulting text, which I printed out to share with Lynn and archived for herself in a 3-ring binder, was around 55 pages. We lost touch over the years following our respective departures from PARC until, in 2020, another PhD student, Philipp Sander, contacted Lynn to interview her. Engaged in doctoral work in Media and Cultural Studies at Leuphana University in Germany, Philipp was interested in understanding the place of Lynn’s VLSI work in the history of the microchip, and in the course of their exchange she pointed him to me as someone else he might talk with. Philipp’s consequent email sent me down to my basement to retrieve the binder and re-read the transcript. More importantly, it reconnected me with Lynn, and our conversation resumed with as much enthusiasm as it had begun 40 years earlier. What follows is the original transcript of our conversations, preceded by a cover memo written at the time. Our conversations about that conversation continue (in part from comments on the transcript) as we, in Lynn’s words, grope our way into ever-clearer mutual understandings of the events surrounding that earlier encounter. As Lynn points out, rather than serving as any ‘real record’ of what we were actually thinking at the time, the transcript only just cracks open the door to shed light on what was going on in each of our worlds. For example, we've already noticed that rather profound social, political, and interpersonal forces were at play 2 Conway Suchman Conversation Conway-Suchman conversation that were not only not discussed but were quite carefully kept between the lines of our text.1 It is those threads of the subtext that we’re now most keen to recover, to trace their effects and their wider resonance with other (his)stories of technoscientific research and development. XEROX Palo Alto Research Center, Systems Science Laboratory April 1980 To: Conversations File From: Lucy Suchman Subject: Suchman-Conway Conversations Stored: (Suchman)ConFile.memo This file documents an ongoing project in ‘cross-cultural communication.’ It began with my interest in the sociological implications of Lynn Conway’s work in the field of VLSI. As an anthropologist, I shared Lynn's fascination with the issues of design, network collaboration and technical demystification raised by the MPC79 experience. Those issues were the focus of our first meeting, which we recorded and transcribed. We found that the transcript provided an interesting artifact. It had several properties. First, by externalizing Lynn’s knowledge it immediately became a document of MPC79 and could be read as history. It could also, therefore, be read as a text, with all of the opportunities for finding topics and developing lines of discussion that a text provides. And finally, it provided a record of our first attempt at a dialogue. More precisely, it suggested the terms for such a dialogue. We found that the issues of specialization developing out of the story of MPC79 had to do with just the work that we were ourselves engaged in, i.e., finding topics and concepts of mutual interest and usefulness across the boundaries of our respective fields. At the same time that the transcript talked about that project as a topic, it served as resource for carrying it out. Our subsequent meetings have taken a more free-running and conversational form. Each time, however, we’ve tried to maintain some continuity with the one before. In that effort the transcripts have been very useful. A recurring topic of our talks has been how to find a framework for communication across disciplines. The object is to find the level at which specialized knowledge from one field can be presented to a 3 Conway Suchman Conversation Conway-Suchman conversation novice from another so as to disclose its underlying simplicity, while not losing the depth and complexity that makes it genuinely special. These discussions are not intended to be tightly ordered. At times they may wander, loop, or become downright silly. With that caveat, we invite you to read them in the same spirit of relaxed exploration by which they were generated. The hope is that whatever your field, there will be resonance at some point along the way. c. Copyright 1980 by Lucy Suchman Conversation I (MPC79), March 12, 1980, Filed on Maxc<Suchman>Conl.press Conversation with Lynn Conway re MPC79 3/12/80 (S = Suchman, C = Conway) S: The things that have particularly interested me about it, other than just the sequence of events – there are two major topics that I think are really interesting. One of them is the whole issue of the “network adventure,” as you call it. That kind of open collaboration. C: Right. S: An open collaboration that’s facilitated by having that electronic medium to communicate with. And the second thing is the demystification of what was traditionally a very specialized field of endeavor. C: Okay. S: So maybe you could just go over the sequence of events, the way things happened. And then however those topics come into it – and whatever other topics you think are really important that those don’t include. C: And while we're doing that why don’t you try to keep me on track or point the thing off in directions as they seem interesting. S: Sure. C: The interesting thing, I think, is that the two things – the use of the network and the network adventure aspect has been coupled in a close way with the demystification. I’ll try to see if I can indicate how that happens. 4 Conway Suchman Conversation Conway-Suchman conversation A lot of this is intuitive. I think that what happens is that, how would I say it, the people involved in this have been – and when I say “this” I really mean the creation of the early course material, the work on the book,2 the simplification and streamlining of techniques of implementing designs once you have them, and then lately, this new system for collecting many designs and so forth, and sort of spreading that culture – I would say there’s one quality about the people involved. And that is that – I perceive this – that myself, Carver Mead, Doug Fairbairn, Dick Lyon, a bunch of Carver’s students and some of the others we’ve interacted with since very early, have all been sort of intellectual entrepreneurs. They’re interested in just making things happen, and having fun, and basically are a bunch of people that found themselves suddenly with a set of possible things to get going, and access to this network. And then, you know, just started operating. Operators might be a good word. Operators in the financial sense or business sense. Okay? S: Right. C: Which meant they would take risks, and just try out crazy things. Okay. But then also I think that some of us had an intuitive notion about how to use the networks to do some things. Being able to envision some mechanisms you might be able to get your hands on that would make things happen faster and go certain ways. S: Does that, do you think, come from experience? Just having used the network for a long period of time for other – C: Yes, yes. That’s a very good point. What I think happened was, a sort of critical point was, something triggered our starting to operate in the Arpanet just like we operate here on the second floor [of PARC].3 So it was probably that prior to all this most of us had been embedded here on the second floor in a variety of projects not really related to this, doing our own thing here, and had learned a style of joining, or forming and leading quick tasks pulled together where a bunch of people will go off and build a program, write a paper, do a thing in the network here on the second floor. When this thing happened there was another counter pressure. There wasn’t much interest in this on the second floor. I hadn’t thought about that, that’s sort of old history. In fact the effort was sort of scoffed at as naive. It’s interesting. So then there was this reaching out looking for collaborators outside.