US Patent 3,400,371 granted to IBM, formally recognizing Conway's co-invented dynamic instruction scheduling technique.
On August 29, 1968, the United States Patent and Trademark Office formally granted US Patent 3,400,371, titled "Dynamic Instruction Handling," to IBM, with Lynn Conway named as a co-inventor.
This patent codified a technique for allowing a computer processor to dynamically reorder and issue multiple instructions per cycle, rather than strictly executing instructions in their original sequential order. At the time, this was a radical departure from conventional single-issue, in-order processor designs, and it anticipated the superscalar and out-of-order execution architectures that would not become mainstream in commercial microprocessors until the 1990s.
The grant came just months after Conway had been dismissed from IBM in 1968, following her disclosure that she intended to undergo gender transition—an act that, in the social and legal climate of the late 1960s, cost her her job, her professional reputation under her birth name, and contact with much of her professional network. She would go on to rebuild her career from scratch under a new identity, without being able to publicly claim credit for this and other IBM-era work until decades later.
Modern historians of computing, including researchers writing in IEEE publications and Nature Electronics, have since recognized this patent as strong evidence that Conway's ACS-era work anticipated core principles of superscalar computer design by roughly three decades.