Olivetti – Programma 101 (1967) [video] | Hacker News Reader

Olivetti – Programma 101 (1967) [video]

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58 pointsturrini24 comments

As an Italian, it's so sad to see how the second PC (and possibly first commercially-viable PC?) was Italian and it all went downhill from there :-/

Do you know about https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Société_générale_de_Belgique ?

apparently a failed venture on SGB caused De Benedetti to lose money impeding Olivetti to develop new computers in the 80s boom.

I wasn't aware of that, but for sure it's a shame.

We kind of got a small revenge on the hardware side with Arduino, although ruined by the trademark dispute in the US.

Past performance will not necessarily reflect (and should not dictate) future returns :)

Also, the Arab world is arguably worse off... Invented much of math, and is now dominated by ascientific theocracies

> Past performance will not necessarily reflect (and should not dictate) future returns :)

Not but you know--Bell, Microsoft, IBM and others are doing pretty well.

> Also, the Arab world is arguably worse off... Invented much of math, and is now dominated by ascientific theocracies

Hardly comparable. You're talking about stuff that happened thousands (5000? no idea) ago, Olivetti had a PC a handful of years before it took off and made many billionaires.

> Also, the Arab world is arguably worse off... Invented much of math

This is historically not true. Sure we get terms like "algebra", "algorithm", etc from the arab world, but the arab world didn't invent these mathematics ideas/fields. These ideas/fields go back to the mesopotamia and ancient greece. Also, the mathematical concepts developed throughout china, india, etc also.

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

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

Certainly the arab world made contributions to math but they certainly didn't invent most of math.

> and is now dominated by ascientific theocracies

Even during the islamic golden age, it was dominated by "ascientific" theocracies. One doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the other.

Fair enough!

In case you think this is fake revisionism and computer revolution and Italians don't mix well: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federico_Faggin

I would say that Redis counts as a counterexample, too :)

You too gente :-) Redis is just the incarnation of technology available, so it does not provide any real added value in perspective, however people like Faggin are not isolated cases. Italians insist in believing that the creative force of our country is something lost in the history, but this is not true. For sure in the latest decades there was a serious issue due to the fact that school, once very rigid, became a joke now.

Do you think the gap was caused by a decline in the quality of education? I'm convinced the Italian software industry was set back in the Eighties due to the lack of laws protecting intellectual property. It was more convenient and risk-free to sell compilations of pirated software on datasettes in newspaper stands, than set up a software development company.

Ah, Olivetti. That brings back memories of the M24 my dad bought through his work, I think it was in '88. An 8086 at 8Mhz, 640Kb of RAM (more than enough :) and CGA color graphics (that's a whopping 4 simultaneous colors).

My Dad had one too, but I don't remember the date. It was probably one of the first in Northern Ireland at that time based on later discussions with him. I always gravitate to my Amiga when I visit home, but we still have the M24 knocking around. I wonder if it'll still have the old Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheets he was working on.

There is a great movie about the life of Adriano Olivetti. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2450898/

The businessman having his wife/secretary operate the machine poolside after a dip might be the best thing I've seen in advertisement ever.

There is no way any company would dare pull that in the present political world...

I found it more interesting when the engineer picked up the readied punchcard and filled in some numbers. I suspect that beyond the storage medium (these days he would probably open some Excel template file), this is what most computing is still about today.

If you are not familiar with Olivetti (the company), or the founder's son (Adriano), you should.

In a parallel universe, Olivetti is the market leader in chip manufacturing, and Intel never existed.

In a parallel universe, SV is in Italy. Yeah, sure. Let's keep dreaming, fellow Italian.

You should read this ebook, fellow Italian. You can download it for free, in our universe. http://giorgiogaruzzo.com/

Well, in this universe, the actual design/development of new Olivetti PC related models, actually happened in Cupertino, JFYI (in Italian):

http://www.storiaolivetti.it/percorso.asp?idPercorso=608

https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olivetti_Advanced_Technology_C...

It must be the air in Silicn Valley ...

This reminded me of the scene in "Sopranos", when Paulie visits a Starbucks-like cafe https://youtu.be/cUKJWsnAAXs?t=1m1s

I remember visiting the Olivetti Research Labs in Cambridge in about 1987 and interviewing Herman Hausser and Andy Hopper (I was a tech journalist many moons ago)

Some of the stuff they were doing was really innovative. Every member of staff wore 'Active Badges' containing something that today sounds rather like an RFID chip. and sensors blanketing the building

You could Telnet into the main campus machine and Finger someone's name and get the response 'Andy Hopper was last seen 5 minutes ago, by the lifts, on the ground floor'.

I thought that was dead cool at the time.

That would be dead cool even now!

going from home use, to stored programs, to multivariate math subroutine in 10 seconds

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