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Tech Women: Meet ENIAC Programmer Kathleen McNulty

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Charvi Kathuria
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Kathleen McNulty Mauchly Antonelli was one of the six original programmers of ENIAC. The main purpose behind developing it was to calculate artillery firing tables for the United States Army’s Ballistic Research Laboratory.

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Birth and Education

This brilliant woman was born on February 12, 1921, during the Irish War of Independence in the small village of Creeslough in the Gaeltacht area of County Donegal, Ireland.

She completed her schooling from Catholic School. McNulty pursued a degree in Mathematics from Chestnut Hill College for Women in Philadelphia.

For McNulty, life was like a “computer”: “We did have desk calculators at that time, mechanical and driven with electric motors, that could do simple arithmetic. You’d do a multiplication and when the answer appeared, you had to write it down to reenter it into the machine to do the next calculation."

"We were preparing a firing table for each gun, with maybe 1,800 simple trajectories. To hand-compute just one of these trajectories took 30 or 40 hours of sitting at a desk with paper and a calculator. As you can imagine, they were soon running out of young women to do the calculations.”

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Read Also: Tech Women: Meet Adriana Ocampo, Science Program Manager, NASA

Career

  • In a bid to find a job other than school teaching, she opted for many business courses in her college schedule, including accounting, business law, banking, economics, and statistics.
  • She started working on calculating trajectories for the firing table.
  • In June 1945, she got selected to be one of ENIAC’s first programmers.
  • She represented the ENIAC inventors and initiators by authoring various articles, interviews and giving lectures.

Death

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  • She succumbed to cancer in 2006 at the age of 85.

Recognition

In 1986, the Letterkenny Institute of Technology honoured McNulty by establishing a medal in her name. The medal is given to a computer science student every year.

She was inducted into the Women in Technology International Hall of Fame in 1997.

In July 2017, Dublin City University honoured this perspicacious woman by naming their computer building after her.

Read Also: Tech Women: Meet Marlyn Wescoff Meltzer, ENIAC Programmer

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