Talk:Kathleen Antonelli

Other ENIAC members?

Would it be prudent to include the accomplishments of other ENIAC members in order to keep Antonelli's in context of her coworkers? — Preceding unsigned comment added by Srosen12 (talk • contribs) 20:46, 17 February 2023 (UTC)

I think they have (and deserve) their own articles. 69.112.184.37 (talk) 13:39, 6 March 2023 (UTC)

Subroutine

Subroutine claims John Mauchly during his work on ENIAC, with a citation. 'It Began with Babbage: The Genesis of Computer Science. Oxford University Press. pp. 155–. ISBN 978-0-19-930943-6.'

Aware of Stigler's law of eponymy, nevertheless would like to clear up whether subroutines where 'in hardware, by design' (ie. the jump instruction), or actually only conceived while programming?Mwasheim (talk) 10:52, 19 December 2018 (UTC)

Mauchly introduced the term in January of 1947 in a Harvard Symposium entitled 'Preparation of Problems for EDVAC-type Machines'. Mwasheim (talk) 13:42, 20 December 2018 (UTC)

I did find: http://fortune.com/2014/09/18/walter-isaacson-the-women-of-eniac/ Mwasheim (talk) 10:50, 18 December 2018 (UTC)

The excerpt from the fortune article which is quite clear:

"Around the same time that Grace Hopper was doing so at Harvard, the women of ENIAC were developing the use of subroutines. They were fretting that the logical circuits did not have enough capacity to compute some trajectories. It was McNulty who pushed a solution. “Oh, I know, I know, I know,” she said excitedly one day. “We can use a master programmer to repeat code.” They tried it and it worked. “We began to think about how we could have subroutines, and nested subroutines, and all that stuff,” recalled Jennings. “It was very practical in terms of doing this trajectory problem, because the idea of not having to repeat a whole program, you could just repeat pieces of it and set up the master programmer to do this. Once you’ve learned that, you learn how to design your program in modules. Modularizing and developing subroutines were really crucial in learning how to program.”

Unclear is who is speaking/reporting? Sigh. --Mwasheim (talk) 10:24, 19 December 2018 (UTC)

This is a bit vague but may be the direction from(https://courses.cs.washington.edu/courses/csep590/06au/readings/00511940-frist.pdf ): After 1947, the trade-off decision between the storage of data or the recomputation of an analytic expression representing the data was made by the women programmers. as part of the programming process. Such decisions continue as a part of the programming process to some extent even todayMwasheim (talk) 11:17, 18 December 2018 (UTC)

Tricky. The ENIAC page also mentions Antonelli (well Mauchly) as responsible for subroutines. The cite there is the fortune article.

Close reading suggestions subroutines where there by design. IE the capability of branching, parallelism and the master programmer for loop control. But that's speculation.Mwasheim (talk) 11:53, 18 December 2018 (UTC)

Von Neuman after being introduced to ENIAC published First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC wherein "He proposes two kinds of fast memory, delay line and Iconoscope tube. Each minor cycle is to be addressed as a unit (word addressing, Sec. 12.8). Instructions are to be executed sequentially, with a special instruction to switch to a different point in memory (i.e. a jump instruction)"Mwasheim (talk) 10:40, 19 December 2018 (UTC)

Greenie

Does this "Greenie" (the selected, but replaced, computer) have a name? If not, should we indicate "true name unknown"? NoDepositNoReturn (talk) 02:16, 16 June 2008 (UTC)

Mystery solved on my talk page. I encourage an addition of this information to the ENIAC article as well. NoDepositNoReturn (talk) 03:52, 19 June 2008 (UTC)

Why the Blueprints?

The explanation for why the ENIAC operators worked off of blueprints in this article is that the ENIAC project is classified. The explanation in Betty Holberton was that "they were viewed too incompetent to work with physical materials."

Both seem suspect to me -- obviously, they were competent to operate the ENIAC for years under production circumstances, and were demonstrably competent throughout their preceding careers, so I have to ask "viewed incompetent by whom?" But as for the other claim, I find it highly suspect that the ENIAC would be classified, but not its "blueprints". Were they at different classification levels? What classification?

I changed the Holberton statement to match the Antonelli article, since this one is better developed and higher rated, but I think the blueprint story needs a reference in either case. —Preceding unsigned comment added by NoDepositNoReturn (talk • contribs) 2008-06-15T23:45:19

From memory, my understanding was that it was simply a matter of access to the room where the ENIAC was being built, which required security clearances. I can imagine the "too incompetent" remark might also have some degree of validity, inasmuch as the programmers were not electrical engineers and may not have been qualified to work with the hardware prematurely if the machine was still in its shakedown phase. I'll put in some e-mails to see if anyone can clarify the matter. Robert K S (talk) 13:22, 16 June 2008 (UTC)

Self-link removed

Hi all. The article had a self-link, which I now removed. If it had a useful purpose, you can revert me. Thanks. Sofia Koutsouveli (talk) 03:31, 6 March 2014 (UTC)

External links modified

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Name

I'm not trying to change the article name, but it seem to me that we should be using McNultly for 90% of this.

• She was McNultly when she did all of her relevant work
• Yes, she was Mauchly for ~30 years after that
• Then Antonelli for the 15 years until her death

I would expect and hope that there's some general policy/guidelines for this but haven't the energy currently to chase it up. Thoughts? - Snori (talk) 00:21, 9 September 2020 (UTC)

Comment: I fully agree with this comment. I note that the very first sentence of the article identifies her as "Kathleen "Kay" McNulty Mauchly Antonelli" As noted all her work was done under McNulty, she was 64 and long retired when she took the name Antonelli. I don't know of any tradition/convention where the name of an intermediate spouse (Mauchly) is retained. Sadly, this seems another (inadvertent) example of hiding McNulty's accomplishments in the shadow of men. Either the article should identify her as Kathleen McNulty or Kathleen McNulty Antonelli 173.3.10.180 (talk) 14:09, 4 November 2021 (UTC)

I fully agree. Especially when you consider that the article makes an explicit point that her own pioneering work was lost in the shadow of Mauchly. At a minimum her name should be hyphenated. To be honest the name Antonelli has the least bearing on her work. 69.112.184.37 (talk) 20:26, 9 February 2023 (UTC)

Let's Fix the Title of this Article

The article details how recognition of McNulty's work has suffered by being pushed into her husbands shadow. Sadly this article continues the practice. Her accomplishment were all done under the name McNulty, and to file her under her second husbands name, whom she married very late in life and was no longer active in the field is highly misleading. 69.112.184.37 (talk) 13:38, 6 March 2023 (UTC)

"the pay was low" - was it? The quote above says it is good for the time

https://www2.census.gov/library/publications/1947/demographics/p-s-22.pdf

And the census indicates in 1945 median total income was $903 for one person if I am reading it right. AidanWelch (talk) 00:06, 25 February 2024 (UTC)