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 As the first blog entry got exhausted. My second book |
| Evolution of Love Part 2 |
| In 1942, a young woman named Kathleen McNulty—who went by Kay—received her civil service assignment papers from the U.S. government. Under "Position," the form read: "Computer." Today, that would be confusing. In 1942, it was perfectly clear. A computer was a person, usually a woman, who performed mathematical calculations by hand. The job required exceptional mathematical ability, extraordinary patience, and meticulous attention to detail. One small error in a long calculation could invalidate hours of work. Kay had graduated from Chestnut Hill College in Philadelphia with a degree in mathematics—one of only three math majors in her class. Jobs for women mathematicians were scarce, but World War II had created urgent demand for a specific kind of calculation: ballistics trajectories. The military needed artillery tables—detailed charts showing how artillery shells would travel under different conditions: various angles, different amounts of gunpowder, accounting for wind, temperature, and air resistance. Every combination required complex calculations involving differential equations that had to be solved step by step. Before computers—the electronic kind—these calculations were done entirely by hand by human computers. Kay joined the Moore School of Electrical Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania, where she became part of a team of women performing these calculations. They worked with mechanical desk calculators, pencils, and enormous sheets of paper covered in numbers. Each trajectory calculation could take several days to complete. The work was tedious but critical. Artillery crews in combat zones depended on these tables. Inaccurate calculations meant shells that missed their targets or, worse, endangered friendly troops. The human computers knew that their mathematical precision directly affected whether soldiers lived or died. But even as Kay and her colleagues worked through calculations by hand, engineers at the Moore School were building something revolutionary: an electronic machine that could perform calculations automatically. The machine was called ENIAC—Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer. It was enormous: 30 tons of equipment, 18,000 vacuum tubes, 70,000 resistors, and 10,000 capacitors spread across a room roughly 30 by 50 feet. It consumed 150 kilowatts of power and generated so much heat that the room required industrial cooling. ENIAC's purpose was to automate exactly the kind of ballistics calculations that Kay and the other human computers performed by hand. If it worked, it could complete in 30 seconds what took a human computer 20 hours. But there was a problem: the machine existed, but no one knew how to make it actually solve problems. In 1945, the Army selected six women from the human computer pool to figure out how to operate ENIAC. Kay McNulty was one of them. The others were Betty Snyder, Marlyn Wescoff, Ruth Lichterman, Betty Jean Jennings, and Frances Bilas. The challenge they faced was unlike anything anyone had attempted before. ENIAC wasn't programmed with software the way modern computers are. There was no keyboard, no monitor, no programming language. Instead, the machine was programmed physically by setting thousands of switches to specific positions and connecting cables between different panels in precise patterns. To make ENIAC solve a problem, you had to understand both the mathematics of the problem and the intricate internal workings of the machine—which panels controlled which operations, how data flowed through different units, what switch settings corresponded to specific mathematical operations. And there were no manuals. No instruction guides. No training programs. The engineers who built ENIAC had focused on making the hardware work; they hadn't created documentation for how to use it. The six women were given the machine's logical diagrams—technical schematics showing how the components connected—and told to figure it out. So they did. They studied the diagrams obsessively, tracing signal paths through the machine's circuits. They interviewed the engineers who'd built different sections, asking detailed questions about how each unit functioned. They spent hours in the ENIAC room, walking between panels, planning how to route data through the machine to solve specific equations. What they were doing didn't have a name yet. Today we'd call it programming, but in 1945, that term wasn't used for what they were doing. They were "setting up problems" or "operating" the machine. The idea that this work—the logical planning of how to make a machine solve a problem—was a distinct discipline wouldn't emerge for several more years. But that's exactly what they were creating: the foundations of computer programming. They developed systematic methods for breaking complex problems into steps the machine could execute. They figured out how to make ENIAC perform calculations in sequence, with the output of one operation becoming the input for the next. They created ways to make the machine loop—repeating the same operations multiple times with different data—which saved having to reset switches for every iteration. This concept of reusable sequences of operations would eventually be formalized as "subroutines," one of the fundamental building blocks of all modern software. The ability to define a process once and reuse it multiple times is central to programming. The ENIAC programmers were among the first to implement this idea in practice. When ENIAC was publicly demonstrated in February 1946, it stunned observers by calculating a ballistics trajectory in seconds—work that took human computers days. The demonstration made headlines around the world, celebrating the engineers who'd built the machine. The six women who'd figured out how to make it actually work weren't mentioned in the press coverage. They weren't introduced at the demonstration. Their contributions were invisible to the public and would remain largely unrecognized for decades. This wasn't unusual. Throughout computing's early history, hardware engineering was considered the prestigious, important work—designing and building machines. Programming was seen as clerical work, less technically sophisticated, less worthy of recognition. Since programming was done primarily by women, this perception served to devalue both the work and the people doing it. But the reality was the opposite. Making ENIAC solve real problems required deep understanding of mathematics, logic, and the machine's architecture. It required creativity to devise efficient methods for complex calculations. It required precision because a single incorrect switch setting could produce garbage results. The ENIAC programmers weren't just operators following instructions. They were pioneers inventing a new discipline from scratch. Kay McNulty continued working with ENIAC as it evolved. She helped convert it from its original cabled programming method to a stored-program architecture—an innovation that made programming faster and more flexible. She worked on some of the earliest applications of computing to non-military problems. In 1948, she married John Mauchly, one of ENIAC's principal designers—evidence of how thoroughly she understood the machine, working alongside its creator as an equal collaborator. For decades, the contributions of the ENIAC programmers remained obscure. Computing history focused on the engineers who built the machines, not the mathematicians who made them useful. When people discussed ENIAC's significance, they talked about hardware innovations—the use of vacuum tubes, the parallel processing architecture, the calculation speed—not the programming techniques that actually allowed it to solve problems. It wasn't until the 1980s and 1990s that historians began recovering the story of the ENIAC programmers. Researcher Kathryn Kleiman tracked down the surviving programmers and documented their work, leading to growing recognition of their contributions. Kay—who after John Mauchly's death married Severo Antonelli and became Kay Antonelli—lived long enough to see her work finally acknowledged. She was inducted into the Women in Technology International Hall of Fame in 1997. She gave interviews describing the early days of ENIAC, explaining how they'd figured out programming before programming had a name. She died in 2006, having witnessed the transformation of computing from room-sized machines programmed with thousands of switches to pocket-sized devices running billions of calculations per second. But the fundamental concepts she helped establish—breaking problems into logical steps, creating reusable sequences of operations, systematically planning how to make machines solve problems—remain at the heart of all programming. Kay McNulty Mauchly Antonelli's career trajectory tells the story of computing itself: from human computers performing calculations by hand, to the first electronic machines, to the emergence of programming as a discipline, to the recognition that software was just as important as hardware. She began as a computer—the human kind—and helped create computers—the electronic kind—and in between, she invented programming. Not bad for someone whose contributions were invisible for fifty years. Every time you run a function, call a subroutine, or reuse a piece of code, you're using concepts that Kay and five other women pioneered in a room full of cables and switches when programming didn't even have a name yet. They were the first programmers. They just weren't called that until decades later. |
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