Excellent technical history, but it misses what made Olivetti incomparable: Adriano's human-centric philosophy that business and human culture were inseparable.

The article mentions worker housing and urban planning in passing, then moves on. But that was the strategy. Ivrea wasn't welfare—it was integrated design. Factory, housing, schools, public spaces all operating under one coherent philosophy: machines and lives should both be beautiful and functional.

Search "Olivetti negozio", "fabbrica" or "architettura"—the retail design and factory architecture show it, decades before Apple. But more importantly, search for Adriano's writing on the Community Movement. He believed you couldn't separate good design from good society. The red typewriter wasn't just aesthetics; it was a statement about human dignity.

That's why Olivetti succeeded where technically equivalent competitors didn't. They engineered for humans, not just machines. Beauty, culture, and production were one integrated system.

The article's strength—technical rigor and business detail—accidentally proves the weakness: it treats design and culture as separate from engineering. Olivetti proved they're the same thing.

(I have a working M10 from 1983. Still remarkable machine—that tiltable screen, the integrated design. They were still building for humans, not just specs.)

Olivetti is famous for having bought Acorn, and owning the ARM architecture.

They likely think about that missed opportunity deeply in their corporate culture.

I don't know the story of how they let that get away.

"Such was the secrecy surrounding the ARM CPU project that when Olivetti were negotiating to take a controlling share of Acorn in 1985, they were not told about the development team until after the negotiations had been finalised...

"Olivetti would eventually relinquish majority control of Acorn in early 1996, selling shares to US and UK investment groups to leave the company with a shareholding in Acorn of around 45%."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acorn_Computers

Daaamn... Olivetti.

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An Olivetti PC was an ultimate dream to have in the late 80s and the early 90s for me, in impressionable age of adolescence, prone to the call of tinkering, hacking and programming. They were the brand, at least in Europe.

Such a nice memory :)

BTW

  "The Arduino project began in 2005 as a tool for students at the Interaction Design Institute Ivrea"


  "The institute was based in the former Olivetti Study and Research Centre..."

Growing up in Italy in the 90s, Olivetti was already fading but still everywhere. My grandmother had a Lettera that I swear will outlive us all.

Reading these comments is interesting—for most of you it's nostalgia for nice hardware. In Italy it hits different. We grew up hearing about Olivetti as this national wound. Adriano dies in 1960, Tchou in a car crash a year later, electronics division sold to GE. It gets brought up whenever people complain about "cervelli in fuga" (brain drain)—look, we once had this company that attracted top talent and led the world, and we let it slip away.

I've been living abroad for 10 years now and the irony isn't lost on me. The machines were great. But in Italy what stings is the what-could-have-been.

I worked in Ivrea as well as Milano. So many cool things I saw first at Olivetti. I need to go back to Ivrea and visit the factory. I worked there for like a month before I was allowed to go to lunch by myself for fear of getting lost in the labrynth. I want to stay at Hotel Serra, shaped like a typewriter. Walk via Palestra. Maybe take the train into Torino.

When I was 10 I started to regularly go (after school) to an Olivetti store in my hometown, just hanging there with the owners, that would teach me a few things, like how to enter the M24 bad sectors in the BIOS, or how most mechanical writing machines could be "fixed" just by cleaning them. Such machines were so well designed: the best industrial designs of the time. I was already an owner of an Olivetti PC1, probably the strangest MS-DOS machine of that time... Anyway talking about all that I just remembered that the owner had a very odd sense of the humor. One day a customer, that loved to develop the films and print his photos at home, told that he had always issues with the leaky window that would let too light enter his black room. Then the owner told him, are you serious? Now they sell the "black light bulbs" that will suck all the light, and indicated the store, in Canicattì (near Campobello, my home town), and that if he would hurry, there are still the last pieces available. The man jumped into the car to immediately go get a few black light bulbes.

My dad speaks fondly of his time at Olivetti. He was a UMich EE grad from Lebanon. Through some chance encounters he had met some Olivetti execs who sent him a TELEX to his home in Lebanon offering him a job in Ivrea, which he took given that it was on the eve of the Lebanese Civil War (~1975). The rest is history...

My dad would often bring home an Olivetti M21 "portable" (quotes deliberate - that thing weighed a lot). Really gorgeous design for its time though.

Back in the 1950s Olivetti was famous for its striking, modernist showrooms, with typewriters and calculators displayed on pedestals like works of art.

It's been said that they inspired the Apple stores.

https://www.archdaily.com/155074/ad-classics-olivetti-showro...

https://www.printmag.com/daily-heller/the-daily-heller-i-los...

If you happen to pass by Ivrea (short trip from Turin or Milan) there is a very nice small museum which showcases most of the machines mentioned. It has also a working Programma 101 and if you are lucky there might be a volounteer that can demo it. There also volounteer giving guided tours and if you are with kids you have the option to have them do a workshop (includes some 3d printing).

https://www.museotecnologicamente.it/category/collezione/

Our school had an Olivetti PC (286), which was memorable for two reasons: it was faster than my own 286 (surprising because I thought they were running at the same clock speed), and it was the only one. Indeed, it was the only Olivetti PC I'd seen anywhere.

>Forty 9003s were installed, offered via lease between 1959 and 1964. The first 9003 was installed at Marzotto in Valdagno

I pass by marzotto almost every weekend during winter (GREAT spots for goulottes). I didn't know that one of the first computers in italy would be installed there.

Such a shame, the rise and fall of marzotto and recoaro.

I worked for Olivetti (outside Italy) on their Point of Sale systems. That division also made ATMs and amazing printers for printing in passport and savings booklets. That printer could lift the print head to skip over the staple in the middle of the booklet and then merrily continue printing.

As a developer it was great, they handed out these gorgeous M380 XP9 machines to everyone “, check out the boot sequence: https://www.instagram.com/reel/DQCF9GsiJrd/

It was while working there that I started to appreciate that design of things you use every day is important.

> Beautiful machines from a beautiful country

Indeed.

I think the most beautiful PC clone of the 80s was the Olivetti Prodest PC1. Perhaps it deserves a mention in your article.

Also about olivetti: Olivetti & the Italian Computer: What Could Have Been. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vfMxcrN90PE

Very interesting article. I still have a working Olivetti M24 at home that I occasionally turn on just for the sake of nostalgia.

In the US, the brand was not as prominent as elsewhere in the burgeoning PC industry but the AT&T 6300 series were OEM systems. Built like a brick shithouse and not too pricey for a reto PC.

I restored a beautiful 1946 Olivetti last year, having had nothing to do with typewriters beforehand. I just happened to see it on marketplace and pulled the trigger.

It needed a good clean, and some parts needed bent back into shape, but after that it worked like a dream. The mechanism for the tab stops is fantastic.

Somewhat apropos is this excellent video I just watched yesterday where Olivetti's graphics were touched on:

https://youtu.be/xNsK_F4JlG4?t=586

I remember them for their luggables. ‘Portable’ computers in the 80s.

https://www.vintage-computer.com/machines.php?olivettim18p

My mom had an Olivetti Quaderno notebook. Just seeing the image brought so many memories. I was about 10 years. The buttons, the strange small display, bevels, ripples around the power button... Thank you for the article!

The namesake for this emacs minor mode for writing: https://github.com/rnkn/olivetti

Adriano Olivetti (1960) Mario Tchou (1961)

We had an electric Olivetti typewriter at home when I was growing up before we got a word processor/pc

I worked for Olivetti’s Advanced Technology Lab in Cupertino CA in the late 80s. They had some innovative PCs back then.

See also this lovely typeface revival. https://lineto.com/typefaces/valentine

Wow, the MP1 was 30 years ahead of its time. I can see why people pay (or at least ask) kilobucks for them (e.g., https://www.ebay.com/itm/336225919296).

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