15 Facts About Kathleen Antonelli

Kathleen Antonelli was born Kathleen Rita McNulty in Feymore, part of the small village of Creeslough in what was then a Gaeltacht area of County Donegal in Ulster, the northern province in Ireland, on February 12,1921, during the Irish War of Independence.

Kathleen Antonelli was the third of six children of James and Anne McNulty.

At the time, Kathleen McNulty was unable to speak any English, only Irish; she would remember prayers in Irish for the rest of her life.

Kathleen Antonelli graduated with a degree in mathematics in June 1942, one of only a few mathematics majors out of a class of 92 women.

Kathleen Antonelli learned that insurance companies' actuarial positions required a master's degree; therefore, feeling that business training would make her more employable, she took as many business courses as her college schedule would permit: accounting, money and banking, business law, economics, and statistics.

Kathleen Antonelli immediately called her two fellow math majors, Frances Bilas and Josephine Benson about the ad.

Kathleen Antonelli stated the pay was "very good at the time".

Kathleen Antonelli was further promoted to supervising calculations on the analyser.

In June 1945, Kathleen Antonelli was selected to be one of its first programmers, along with several other women from the computer corps: Betty Snyder, Marlyn Wescoff, and Ruth Lichterman, and a fifth computer named Helen Greenman.

In 1996, Kathleen Antonelli said that John Mauchly pronounced the name of the computer "EN-ee-ack", unlike the common pronunciation at the time of "EEN-ee-ack".

Kathleen Antonelli was transferred to Aberdeen Proving Ground's Ballistics Research Laboratory along with the ENIAC when it was moved there in mid-1947.

Kathleen Antonelli was joined by Ruth Lichterman and Bilas, but the other three programmers preferred to stay in Philadelphia rather than relocate to the remote Aberdeen.

Kathleen Antonelli was inducted into the Women in Technology International Hall of Fame in 1997 along with the other original ENIAC programmers, and she accepted the induction of John Mauchly into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in Akron, Ohio, in 2002.

In 1997, Kathleen Antonelli was inducted into the Women in Technology International Hall of Fame, along with the five other ENIAC programmers, for their contributions on programming ballistics trajectories.

In 2019, the Irish Centre for High-End Computing at the National University of Ireland, Galway, named its new Waterford-based primary supercomputer, which is to serve as Ireland's national supercomputer for academic researchers, Kay, following a public poll, wherein Kathleen Antonelli beat out candidates including botanist Ellen Hutchins, scientist and inventor Nicholas Callan, geologist Richard Kirwan, chemist Eva Philbin, and hydrographer Sir Francis Beaufort.