According to her wikipedia article, Kay McNulty invented the subroutine. An international team of men working in secret built the hardware of the first computer, ENIAC. When it was completed, it was needed to calculate the differential equation ballistics for long-range artillery used in WWII. The technicians had written a few test programs. But a team of Computers—women who computed these same differential equations by hand—were tasked with loading the first program onto ENIAC. The men hand them a wiring diagram and told to work it out.
We are fortunate that Kathy Kleiman conducted interviews with these women, wrote a book, Proving Ground, and made a documentary. Otherwise, the women depicted in photos of ENIAC would have been known simply as “models” and not computer science pioneers.
Kathy Kleiman‘s talk at the Cooper Union a few years ago has all the details.
You can rent the documentary on Vimeo.
Kay McNulty spoke only Irish until she started school in America. Her father had been arrested during the Irish War of Independence. I do not know if he was part of the Civil War, but since he was from Creeslough, he was probably Anti-Treaty. Like so many families from Donegal in the early days of Ireland’s statehood, when the wars were over, they chose to emigrate.
Kay always liked math, but didn’t want to be a schoolteacher. She took business and financial courses, and when the war started, she offered her skills to the war effort. She joined a team of women from all over the country, the best Computers the Army could find.
Some might say it was the “female brain” that created the foundations of computer programming. But I don’t believe in “female brains.” There are only human brains. But this team of women were “allowed” to be pioneers because computing was beneath the Gear Heads.
Women working alone together: that’s where the innovation came from.
