Kathleen Rita Antonelli ( McNulty; formerly Mauchly; 12 February 1921 – 20 April 2006), known as Kay McNulty, was an Irish-born American computer programmer and one of the six original programmers of the ENIAC, one of the first general-purpose electronic digital computers. The other five ENIAC programmers were Betty Holberton, Ruth Teitelbaum, Frances Spence, Marlyn Meltzer, and Jean Bartik. Early life and education She was born Kathleen Rita McNulty in Feymore, part of the small village of Creeslough in what was then a Gaeltacht area (Irish-speaking region) of County Donegal in Ulster, the northern province in Ireland, on February 12, 1921, during the Irish War of Independence. She was the third of six children of James and Anne (née Nelis) McNulty. On the night of her birth, her father, an Irish Republican Army training officer, was arrested and imprisoned in Derry Gaol for two years as he was a suspected member of the IRA. On his release, the family emigrated to the United States in October 1924 and settled in the Chestnut Hill section of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania where he found work as a stonemason. 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. She attended parochial grade school in Chestnut Hill (1927 – 1933) and J. W. Hallahan Catholic Girls High School (1933 – 1938) in Philadelphia. In high school, she had taken a year of algebra, a year of plane geometry, a second year of algebra, and a year of trigonometry and solid geometry. After graduating high school, she enrolled in Chestnut Hill College for Women. During her studies, she took every mathematics course offered, including spherical trigonometry, differential calculus, projective geometry, partial differential equations, and statistics. She graduated with a degree in mathematics in June 1942, one of only a few mathematics majors out of a class of 92 women. During her third year of college, McNulty was looking for relevant jobs, knowing that she wanted to work in mathematics but did not want to be a school teacher. She 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. Career Computer programmer A week or two after graduating, she saw