Kathleen Antonelli

Kay McNulty was born Kathleen Rita McNulty on February 12, 1921, in Creeslough, County Donegal, Ireland, during the Irish War of Independence. She became one of the six original programmers of the ENIAC, one of the first general-purpose electronic digital computers. Her father, an Irish Republican Army training officer, was arrested the night she was born and imprisoned in Derry Gaol for two years. The family emigrated to the United States in October 1924 and settled in Chestnut Hill, Philadelphia, where she later studied mathematics and helped shape early computing history.