Interesting obit

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Bummer. She was one of those rare, clear-thinking, KISS types in technology. She and Carver Mead really helped advance VLSI in the early days with a clearly conceived framework (layout description, design rules, and all the rest). RIP.

One of my summer internships in 1986 started with a project in C (learning it on the job) to read a CIF file (actually a badly conceived extension of CIF*) and create an HPGL output for plotting. I later bought a copy of the classic Conway/Mead book and still have it.

After reading more and seeing pics...I may have met her at PARC in the 90s when I was working at a spinout division (Xerox trying, again, to make something that didn't just consume paper and toner). We were in an adjacent building between PARC and Foothill Xpwy. We ate lunch up there frequently and regularly interacted with researchers who were doing work relevant to our various products. Several people in my group (including my boss) had been at PARC before, so we got introduced to a bunch of sharp folks. Coincidentally, one of my coworkers there was also trans.

*Plain CIF lexer and parser were a page or two of lex and yacc code which generated a modest sized C output. The poorly conceived extensions, "designed" by Ricoh engineers, required weird special case parsing and messy yacc and generated 150 pages of C code. Derp.
 
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