The need for women engineers and scientists is growing both in industry and government. . . Women are being offered scientific and engineering jobs where formerly men were preferred. Now is the time to consider your job in science and engineering . . . you will find that the slogan there as elsewhere is "Women Wanted!"
In the summer of 1942, the US Army Women's Corps placed this advertisement in newspapers across the US. The army wanted women with mathematics degrees to undertake gruelling arithmetical work in calculating trajectories for artillery as part of the war effort. One young woman who responded was Kay McNulty, born in the Creeslough Gaeltacht in Co Donegal in 1921. Her decision was to bring her into the front line of the new science of computing - but the part she and other women played at the beginning of the computer age was soon forgotten. On the night she was born, Kay McNulty's father, James, a stone mason who had been active in the IRA from 1917, was arrested and imprisoned in Derry Jail for two years. After his release, he emigrated to the US with his wife Anne (ne Nelis) and their six children. They settled in Philadelphia, where Kay graduated from Chestnut Hill College for Women in 1942 as one of only three mathematics majors in a class of 92. After she was recruited into the war effort, Kay McNulty went to work at the Moore School of Engineering in the University of Pennsylvania with other women whose job title was "computer". As the war accelerated, the computers worked 48-hour weeks calculating firing tables - large tables of data required to make artillery accurate, by including factors such as air drag which affected the performance of a gun. Every new weapon required tables. It was brutally tedious work, using a hand calculator to compute 2,000 trajectories per table, something that could take 40 hours each. Many of the women recruits dropped out owing to the workload, but Kay McNulty became prominent among the "computing" women.
In the basement of the Moore School where the women computers were working, physicist John Mauchly and a post-grad student, Presper Eckert, were building the ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer), the world's first electronic digital computer. It was 10 feet tall, 80 feet wide, and weighed 30 tons. In the autumn of 1945, six women computers were chosen to program ENIAC: Kay McNulty; Jean Bartik; Betty Snyder; Marlyn Meltzer; Ruth Teitelbaum and Frances Spence. Initially, they were not allowed into the ENIAC room because of the secrecy of the project and instead, had to program the computer from blueprints in an adjacent room. This involved breaking down complex differential equations into their smallest possible components and then putting these instructions to the hardware. Once they had devised the program on paper, the women were allowed into the ENIAC room to physically program it and their work paid off. Using their program, ENIAC could add 5,000 numbers or do 14 10-digit multiplications in a second.
"There were no manuals or anything like that," Kay McNulty recalls. "They just gave us the blueprints of the machine and we had to study what it could do. There were 18,000 tubes [valves] and (we had to learn) what each tube could do, how it would do it and so on. We were told that this was just an extension of our work and that we were going to do the same calculations we'd been working on all during the war - and that this was just a different machine than the differential analyser we'd been working on."
This was a new world and there were no major distinctions between hardware designers, programmers and users. "We could ask the engineers questions, but that was how we learnt the machine from an engineering point of view. There was no such thing as computer science and we weren't aware that it was such a monumental thing. We just thought, here was another machine for doing the same work we had been doing all during the war."
The crisis over firing tables, and how to compute them quickly enough, had largely passed by the time ENIAC, which was developed to solve the crisis, came into service. "The very first problem that they put on was the feasibility of the hydrogen bomb. But we didn't know that. We knew that the atom bomb had been dropped, and that the scientists had come from Los Alamos, and gradually as we worked with them we realised that this project was top secret.
"We were quite astonished, not so much about the machine we were working on, but about the types of problems that this machine was going to be able to solve."
In the 1940s, what we now call programming was seen as an extension of the work of a woman computer. The term was used for women programmers until ENIAC came into operation, but was then transferred to the machine. The women programmers were renamed "operators".
In February 1946, the US Army was eager to show off its project and unveiled ENIAC in a series of public demonstrations. However, the women's central role in ENIAC was already being forgotten. According to a memoir by Captain Herman Goldstine: "The actual preparation of the problems put on at the demonstration was done by Adele Goldstine and me with some help on the simpler problems from John Holberton and his girls."
While Goldstine says women played a pivotal role in the ENIAC demonstrations, this information did not appear in official army records. Nor were they mentioned in the war department press releases. Coverage mirrored the army's perspective and the New York Times reported a 1946 demonstration of ENIAC without referring to the women at all: "The ENIAC was then told to solve a difficult problem that would have required several weeks' work by a trained man. The ENIAC did it in exactly 15 seconds."
On the way her role was minimised in official reports, Kay McNulty says: "I don't think it registered with any of us. It was a different time and the very fact that the engineers had done what they'd done was just phenomenal, it was spectacular and they were the ones that deserved all the credit. We were essentially doing the same work we had been doing all during the war, but faster." The invention of the stored-program computer in 1947, made ENIAC's kind of programming obsolete. In 1948, Kay McNulty married John Mauchly and went on to raise seven children.
Mauchly, with Presper Eckert, devised the UNIVAC (the first commercially available computer) which Kay helped to program from home. "John would say `I have this idea for a programming language - try this out and see if this is something that somebody could learn to do? Do you think this would work? Do you think we could train the people to do this?' And he would get me to sit down and try working out a program using some thought that he had."
Mauchly died in 1980 and Kay McNulty married again. On the 50th anniversary of the unveiling of ENIAC in 1996, Women in Technology International publicised the work of the ENIAC women on the Internet. As a result, Kay McNulty Mauchly Antonelli is regularly asked to speak at conferences.
"It was only when people talked about the wonderful things this machine would eventually be able to do that we realised what a machine! I often say: `If I had a dime for every computer in the world I sure would be a rich lady'."
Kay McNulty Mauchly Antonelli, and her contribution to the ENIAC project, is the subject of a documentary directed by Patricia Sharkey (info@searc.ie) for broadcast/webcast in 1999.