ENIAC’s Architects Wove Stories Through Computing

This year marks the 80th anniversary of ENIAC , the first general-purpose digital computer. The computer was built during World War II to speed up ballistics calculations, but its contributions to computing extend well beyond military applications. Two of ENIAC’s key architects—John W. Mauchly, its co-inventor, and Kathleen “Kay” McNulty, one of the six original programmers —married a few years after its completion and raised seven children together. Mauchly and McNulty’s grandchild Naomi Most d