Attendees of the Lynford Lecture Series on November 19 learned about the most serious problems facing computer science today, but perhaps the greater benefit to guests that afternoon was the history lesson provided by one of the field’s founders, Frances Allen. The first female recipient of the A. M. Turing Award — the equivalent of the Nobel Prize for computing — as well as the first woman to be named an IBM Fellow and the first female guest speaker in the 12-year history of the lecture series, Allen spoke about the early days of computer science and about the field’s future. As Provost Dianne Rekow noted in her introductory remarks to Allen’s talk, a tour of the projects Allen worked on at IBM was akin to a tour of the greatest innovations in computer science.