Kay McNulty

Kathleen Rita McNulty was born in Creeslough, County Donegal, on the night her father was arrested by British forces during the Irish War of Independence. The family emigrated to Philadelphia in 1924 with a daughter who still spoke only Irish. She graduated in mathematics in 1942, one of very few women in her year, and was hired the same year at the Moore School as a computer in the original sense: a person who calculated ballistic trajectories, partly by hand and partly on the differential analyser.

In 1945 she was chosen for the group that would program ENIAC — work that meant setting cables and turning dials, with no manual and initially no access to the machine itself. She married John Mauchly in 1948, had five children and left programming as a profession, though she kept arguing about machine design with him at home. The fact that she and the other five went unnamed at ENIAC's 1946 unveiling was not corrected until the 1980s, when a student started asking who the women in the photographs were.