Olivetti Programma 101 (2010) [video] | Hacker News Reader

Olivetti Programma 101 (2010) [video]

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45 pointsohjeez19 comments

2 years ago I moved to Turin, Italy. Very close to Ivrea, the city where Olivetti has/had its HQs. It's impressive the "atmosphere" that you can feel, so many engineers, designers, developers. Adriano Olivetti's impact in Piedmont (and Italy in general) is impressive and long lasting.

It's not a coincidence that Arduino was founded in Ivrea.

Sometimes I dream of a world where Steve Jobs and Jony Ive dismissed German industrial design and went fully Italian. Olivetti instead of Braun - Ettore Sotass instead of Dieter Rams.

As long as it’s not Colani: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luigi_Colani#1990s

I remember that in the 90s Vobis in Germany sold computer systems with Colani mice for a premium. Seems his designs did not age that well or maybe the rounded shapes will have their comeback soon.

Objection, your honor. I think most of that stuff looks pretty neat.

A detailed description of the Programma 101 architecture and internals appears as Chapter 19 in the book Computer Structures: Readings & Examples edited by Gordon Bell and Alan Newell, 1971.

Bell and Newell write, "The Programma 101 (Chap. 19) is at the limit of what we call a stored program computer. It has a sufficient instruction set to be classified as a computer, but the storage for temporary data, constants, and programs is limited. ..." (from the beginning of Section 4 in the book, linked at Bell's web site, URL below)

Here is the HTML verson from Gordon Bell's website:

https://gordonbell.azurewebsites.net/Computer_Structures__Re...

Here are scans of the original book pages from a computer history site:

https://tcm.computerhistory.org/ComputerTimeline/Chap19_oliv...

I just finished reading Empire of the Sum which is a book telling the history of calculators, and has an entire chapter on Olivetti and the Programma 101. Highly recommend if you're interested in calculators.

https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/62585968

Having watched the video, all I can think about is this [1], Soul Limbo by Booker T. and the M.G.'s. Times were certainly better once upon a time.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GWHFa2848uM

> The concept of "personal computer" I'm sorry to say for Americans was introduced in 1965 by Program 101

Hm, maybe an important milestone yes, but PC, no? I think the timeline goes like this:

1961 - Anita 7 - electronic desktop calculator, evolved from electro-mechanical, no stored program.

1965 - P101 - stored program, electronic desktop calculator. General purpose CPU, but the UI was completely calculator. The vision was still +-*/ only.

1968 - Mother of All Demos - this is where I argue the vision of a personal computer was fully formed

1971 - 4004 CPU - this is where you could start to actually buy parts to make a PC

1972 - Micral N - first commercially available microprocessor-based computer

1973 - Xerox Alto

olivetti literally called it a 'personal computer' in their ads

as i understand it, it had conditional jumps but no index registers, self-modifying code, or indirect jumps, so i think you couldn't build subroutines or data structures such as arrays

the lgp-30 was a personal computer tho even if the phrase 'personal computer' was invented later by olivetti's marketing droids

quoting https://www.oldcalculatormuseum.com/c-programma101.html about interviewing its designer by phone

> When it came to talking about Mr. Perotto's assertion that the Programma 101 was the first "personal computer", I expressed my disagreement, saying that the machine was a programmable calculator, not a computer. His voice rose in intensity, and he very firmly stated that the machine was a computer, insisting that it was "not just a programmable calculator". He steadfastly refused to accept the definition of his machines as a programmable electronic calculator. We agreed to disagree (...)

as i understand it, it had conditional jumps but no index registers, self-modifying code, or indirect jumps, so i think you couldn't build subroutines or data structures such as arrays

See the links to a detailed architecture description from the book by Bell and Newell in my post at top level here. They thought it was a real computer -- just barely.

this is fantastic, thank you

1963 - Mathatron. [1] "They laughed when I sat down to play the Mathatron". Just barely programmable. 4 memory locations. By 1967 it had been built up into a reasonable programmable calculator. 48 memory locations! Trig functions!

Early computing was mostly "if only we had more memory". Electronic arithmetic was working at IBM Research before WWII, but cost-effective fast storage was years away.

[1] http://www.vintagecalculators.com/html/mathatron.html

The Mother of All Demos was about a lot of things but I don't remember any PC in there.

Edit: Oh ! What you are talking about is the UI of a modern PC but these UI first became available on shared computer before been available on PC.

First computer I ever programmed: 1970, in 7th grade math class, after school. It was a big deal -- actually having access to a computer! It wasn't a "personal computer" for us, because our school had just the one machine, and for only a few weeks before it moved on to another school in the county. (This was a public school.)

The only thing I can remember is figuring out a set of instructions that would cause it to infinitely and continuously keep inputting the slide-in card. Nobody else thought that was cool. :-)

Same. That was my first computer!

The Programma 101 is an amazing device. If you are ever in Ivrea (the birth place of Olivetti) there is lovely little museum called "Tecnologicamente" where members of the original Olivetti team meet up to fix Programma 101 and tell the story. It's not the CHM but it's a beautiful little place. http://www.museotecnologicamente.it/

high tech everywhere. yet, we did not have need, to extract those toilet smells by placing extraction fan on BOTTOM part of wall, so we do not even have to smell those smelly smells.......... ( we route smells around our heads, instead of routing them away from heads, bodies, clothing )

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