Olivetti Programma 101: At the Origins of the Personal Computer | Hacker News Reader

Olivetti Programma 101: At the Origins of the Personal Computer

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140 pointsrbanffy42 comments

I remember Olivetti PCs from the late 80s to 90s. They were beautifully designed -- not SGI or Sun beautiful -- but beautiful for PCs. I like the "grate" design.

https://www.ebay.com/itm/325569104545

The IBM PS/2 Model 30 was also quite beautiful

https://www.computinghistory.org.uk/userdata/images/large/56...

https://www.ebay.com/itm/166770231506?mkcid=16&mkevt=1&mkrid...

My favorite comes from before the PC era:

https://www.ebay.ie/itm/176082135417

I worked at Olivetti's Advanced Technology Labs in Cupertino until 1989. We were really making some wonderful stuff then, but the company itself was having trouble, and some scandals. The executive staff were always being arrested for one thing or another (see https://www.nytimes.com/1993/11/03/world/accused-olivetti-ch... for example).

We paid more attention to cases, fasteners, and design than most other clone vendors.

I left out of frustration and joined a little company that put a stack-based programming language inside laser printers.

Did you edit with `jet` by any chance?

Lagniappe: https://www.scaruffi.com/history/long.html

would you say it's more like lisp or more like forth? this has been a topic of argument

It's more like forth if I had to pick one. Though it is very lispy -- you can pass functions as objects, etc.

I was quite good at programming in it back in the day.

you may enjoy my friend nathan's http://postscriptcode.com/

he says it's more like forth, i disagree

The IBM PS/1 was the machine I coveted for its beauty, but it was overpriced and underspecced when I could finally think about one; so a generic beige 386-40 it was.

Started on an AT&T 6300 (Olivetti M24) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olivetti_M24#/media/File:Vinta...

Oh, the memories! Great thing was the keyboard, gave the user certain assurance and stability, not sure how would I explain it but those of you who used these, would instantly know what I mean.

The keyboard on the AT&T 6300 looks different to that for the Olivetti M24, just comparing the pictures on the wikipedia page.

I had an M24, with the original design of Logitech mouse that plugged into the keyboard.

I have an M24 too, and what I find interesting is that there are different keyboard designs for the Italian layout, including one with the “typewriter” letter layout (with “m” being at the end of the home row) and the 00 key in the numpad, in addition to the 0.

The keyboard with the strongest psychological boost I've ever experienced is the M0116 Apple Standard Keyboard https://deskthority.net/wiki/Apple_Standard_Keyboard https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hY7XXo5uEZI with its old ALPS (Orange, or sometimes Salmon) switches. Every time you press a few keys the little voice in your head tells you (accurately or not!) "Yes, I have accomplished something meaningful. Significant work is being done here." It's really quite self-defeating that Apple can't find the pocket change necessary to bring back Apple keyboards with early ALPS switches, especially now that it's relatively serious about desktop computing again. Things could be a lot worse though: seven years after introducing the M0116 Apple put out the M2980 Apple "Design" "Keyboard" https://deskthority.net/wiki/AppleDesign_Keyboard which could leave you pining for death.

My first PC was an Olivetti Prodest PC1, and it felt a natural design back then coming from the "wedge" design of the 8 and 16 bit machines of the time, as in "the computer is the keyboard".

http://www.seasip.info/VintagePC/prodestpc1.html

I appreciate now how different the design was!

Yes, Olivetti PCs frequently looked nice. The sting in the tail was incompatibility with third-party components, combined with high prices.

Olivetti had a number of iconic products both from a technological and design perspective.

My favorites (in addition to the Programma 101) was the Divisumma calculator and the Valentine typewriter.

https://www.massmadesoul.com/olivetti-divisumma-18 https://www.massmadesoul.com/olivetti-valentine

Absolutely gorgeous looks.

That calculator reminds me of Neumorphism. Its seems like there really is nothing new under that sun.

https://www.interaction-design.org/literature/topics/neumorp...

The Valentine is famous among the designers, but the truly popular model is the Lettera 22[1]: many journalists and writers, famous or not, used it, and of course it had a hipster revival. (Also a beautiful machine.)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olivetti_Lettera_22

the thing i like most about these is that, though normally they're executing their machine code from the keyboard like a normal calculator, the 'v', 'w', 'y', and 'z' keys jump to user-defined machine code addresses and start executing code from memory. i think that's an inspiring way to provide an application with programmable function keys on a really extremely limited computer, far too small for even forth

The best thing I know about Olivetti, is that nearby my city, there is a small village, where there are houses, schools, nurseries, etc. and Olivetti production centers, where Olivetti's employees were living, it is a great concept to be an innovative company, but also really think about the wellbeing of your employees, that is now lost, now they maybe give you a pizza, some ping pong, and as soon as you're not useful, you're just discarded, the american system is a disgrace

Olivetti also owned Acorn Computer, inventor of the ARM processor, although Dave began a good few years before they bought it. Apparently the project was so secret that Olivetti didn’t know about it until the purchase was complete.

Somewhat related: Steve Job's 1983 talk at Aspen design conference (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n8Q7gXwavUU) where he argues that all good designers are now busy with automobiles and buildings and no one is looking at personal computers.

Still have one of those tucked away at my father’s place. He used to use it at the beginning of his career to run calculations for engineering structural computations before Acca and other similar softwares (in Italy due to very active seismic activity you need to run these sorts of calculations also for very small structures).

if we believe the commenter below about ebay prices, you might be able to buy a new car if you sell it

In 1966, we had one in the Stuyvesant HS computer room, along with an IBM 1130 system that ran Fortran 4. I got good at the Programma, it was quite useful. But I don’t recall 240 steps; I recall less than 100. Indeed, the much more advanced HP 9100 circa 1968, with CRT, rpn, and 10-digit accuracy, had only 196.

Back in the 80s, having their typewriters allowing you to delete the last 4 characters was cutting-edge material. Then a tiny screen was a 'wow moment'.

I just finished reading Empire of the Sum: The Rise and Reign of the Pocket Calculator, which describes the Programma and many of its contemporaries. Highly recommended reading if you're interested in the history of calculating machines and how they intersect with computers.

At least Italy is still interesting when it comes to software development. Unlike Japan which had a good start but it is not that good anymore (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ky1nGQhHTso)

Depends. For example cupy (https://github.com/cupy/cupy) is developed by a Japanese company and I find it extremely effective.

There's also a language called Ruby. I wonder if people have heard about it.

Japan just quickly reached a "good enough" state and decided to stay there. Like banks with their COBOL codebase but everywhere.

> At least Italy is still interesting when it comes to software development

nope

> At least Italy is still interesting when it comes to software development.

Do you have an example ? Doesn't look to me like there is that much great software written in Italy. If you ask me the only thing that comes to my mind right now is antirez and Redis, but then the same can be said about Japan (Matz and Ruby)

the history of p101 from one of the creators: https://archive.org/details/programma101. It's a fascinating reading (sorry, Italian language, hire google for help..), directly from the source, about those years when a new world was born, full of big promises and incredible mistakes. Olivetti is still a case study in economy and management.

also: https://web.archive.org/web/20060511054748/https://www.pierg...

Silicon Valley might have started in Italy with Olivetti, but political issues and unfortunate events stopped it from happening. There's a great podcast about it (Italian): https://podcast.ilsole24ore.com/serie/olivetti-occasione-per...

The way I heard the story, Olivetti management had planned on naming their new Z8000-based machine the "M16", for 16-bits, and luckily a few americans were able to convince them that, in at least one non-italian country, this syntactic space was already occupied.

(these days it seems it may take some bubble-wrangling to convince uncle Google that when I type "t3x" I want, not Tikka, but NMH)

I had their typewriter many many years ago; didn't even know they did PCs.

The first machine I was paid to write code for! Fond memories.

Looking at eBay, 20.000 EUR

That's only $2000 adjusted for inflation (from 1965)

Olivetti was amazing but they got screwed by the Italian government. Basically executive positions were imposed by Italian politics so you ended up with an amazing company with a bunch of scumbags at the top siphoning up all the profits.

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