Kathleen Antonelli

Kathleen McNulty, 1938

Kathleen "Kay" McNulty Mauchly Antonelli (born February 12, 1921 in Creeslough , Ireland ; † April 20, 2006 in Wyndmoor , Pennsylvania , USA ) was one of the six original programmers of the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer (ENIAC) , the first universally applicable electronic digital calculator.

Early life and education

After attending Hallahan Catholic Girls High School in Philadelphia, she graduated from Chestnut Hill College for Women with a degree in mathematics in June 1942 . During her third year of college, Kathleen went looking for a job, knowing that while she wanted to work in mathematics , she was by no means a teacher .

She learned that there were opportunities in the insurance industry to hold a master's degree in actuarial positions. However, these positions were rarely given to women at the time, which is why she took as many business training courses (accounting, money and banking, law, economics and statistics) as possible.

Further career

Kay McNulty, Alyse Snyder and Sis Moignon work on the differential analyzer in the basement of the Moore School of Electrical Engineering, University of Pennsylvania , Philadelphia , between 1942 and 1945.

Between 1943 and 1946 the ENIAC was developed for the calculation of ballistic trajectories for the United States Army . In June 1945 Kathleen was selected as one of the first programmers along with other women such as Betty Snyder , Marlyn Wescoff and Ruth Lichterman . In June and August 1945 she received training at Aberdeen Proving Grounds for IBM punched card devices that were to be used for the ENIAC. Using these punch card machines, ENIAC was able to complete the same ballistic calculations in about 10 seconds.

It was the responsibility of the women to complete the sequence of steps for the calculations and to set up the ENIAC. She began to be interested in the work (programming) of ENIAC engineers like Arthur Burks early on.

Late life and death

Her first husband, John Mauchly , one of the developers of ENIAC, died in 1980 after a long illness. After Mauchly's death, Kathleen gave several lectures on the subject of ENIAC (often together with her colleague and very good friend Jean Bartik ) and was available for interviews with reporters and researchers.

In 1985 she married Severo Antonelli, who suffered from Parkinson's disease and died in 1996. During this time Kathleen suffered a heart attack , from which she recovered fully. In 1997 she was inducted into the Women Technology International Hall of Fame along with the other original ENIAC programmers.

Kathleen Antonelli was diagnosed with inoperable cancer in the spring of 2006 . She died in April of that year at the age of 85.

Web links

• The ENIAC programmers
• ENIAC Programmers at witi.com (English)
• The Women of ENIAC (English)

Individual evidence

1. ^ John J. O'Connor, Edmund F. Robertson :  Kathleen Rita McNulty Mauchly Antonelli. In: MacTutor History of Mathematics archive . , accessed February 9, 2013
2. ↑ Computer Science News : Personalities in Computer Science: Kathleen Antonelli. Retrieved September 4, 2019 . 
3. ^ Death of Donegal's Computing Pioneer. ( Memento of the original from April 22, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. April 2, 2006. County Donegal on the Net News. Retrieved February 14, 2013.