"Isolated from the rest of the world, one woman pushed computing from a geeky obsession into a transformative industry."-BBC

Xia Peisu was born into a family of educated parents, both of whom were teachers, and who attached great importance to her education from an early age. When she was still a young girl, she was not only well-read but also gifted in mathematics. This period not only greatly improved her logical thinking but also stimulated her interest in mathematics (Xia Peisu 2023).

In 1940, Xia Peisu enrolled at the National Central University in Chongqing, majoring in electrical engineering. Four years later, she was admitted without examination to the Telecom Institute of National Chiao Tung University for postgraduate study (Obituary of Academician XIA Peisu 2014). Xia Peisu went on to earn a Ph.D. at the University. In 1951, to serve her motherland, she returned to China, where she soon joined China's first scientific search group on computers (Xia Peisu 2023).

She was responsible for the design of a general-purpose digital computer, Machine 107. By 1960, she had completed the overall functional design, as well as participated in the testing and debugging of the whole machine (Obituary of Academician XIA Peisu 2014). This achievement marked China's first self-designed electronic computer trial production success, thus achieving China's independent design of a general-purpose digital computer, starting from scratch.

She once wrote a "Principles of Electronic Computers" handout, which was the first set of systematically designed teaching materials on computers in China. In order to promote it, she founded a computer workshop to teach the basic principles of electronics, training more than 700 computer professionals for China (Obituary of Academician XIA Peisu 2014). For the next several years, she immersed herself in developing more advanced computers, like a high-speed processor array and related techniques (Women in Coding 2021).

In 1986, Xia Peisu was involved in establishing the only English language journal, the Journal of Computer Science and Technology, which publishes high-quality papers of computer science in China (Nie 2014). In 2002, to commemorate her contribution to the Chinese computer industry, the first Loongson CPU independently developed by China was named "Xia-50" (McNeill 2020).