Kathleen Antonelli: The Irish-Born ENIAC Programmer History Left Out

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Kathleen Rita McNulty was born in February 1921 in an Irish-speaking village in County Donegal, on the night British forces arrested her father, an Irish Republican Army training officer. The family emigrated in October 1924 to Philadelphia, where she arrived speaking no English and found her footing in mathematics. She graduated from Chestnut Hill College for Women in 1942 as one of a handful of math majors in a class of 92, just as the Army began advertising for women with math degrees. Her job title was computer.

This episode follows her from hand-cranked calculators at the Moore School of Engineering, where a single artillery trajectory took 30 to 40 hours, to the differential analyzer in the basement and then to ENIAC, which did the same work in 10 seconds. Chosen in June 1945 as one of its first programmers, she had to learn the machine from blueprints before she was allowed to see it. When ENIAC was shown to the press, she and her colleagues were asked to act as hostesses.

As a civil service computer at grade SP-4 she earned 1,620 dollars a year and taught herself numerical integration on the job under supervisor Lila Todd.
She is credited with proposing the subroutine, worked out with Jean Bartik, so that ENIAC's limited hardware could reuse one block of logic.
The classified equations the programmers ran turned out to include feasibility calculations for the hydrogen bomb.
After marrying ENIAC co-inventor John Mauchly in 1948 she resigned her post but kept working on software design for the BINAC and UNIVAC I from home.
She joined the Women in Technology International Hall of Fame in 1997, and in 2019 the Irish public voted to name the national supercomputer Kay.

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