Olivetti’s Ivrea | Hacker News Reader

Olivetti’s Ivrea

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147 pointsrbanffy30 comments

I worked in the factory. I remember it well even from the one photo. The factory had a Winchester Mystery House air about it. It had been added to many times over the decades. So it was more like Rome and less like Turino with no obvious way to get from here to there. They made typewriters there well into the 80s. Olivetti had commuter buses in Ivrea and Milan well before Google buses were invented. They had wine at the company cafeteria for lunch. It was the 80s and I would bet my boss an ice cream on NBA games which I already knew the scores of from an email. Hotel La Serra was structured like a typewriter. A river runs through Ivrea and it had a kayaking center.

I'd love to go back and take a tour.

> I'd love to go back and take a tour.

It's a ruin now.[1]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X7XEa7tC7xU

That part is a ruin. Olivetti had a lot of buildings in what was a company town. To reach the Olivetti operator from my apartment, IIRC I dialed 6. But the old factory building ("Mattoni Rossi") that I worked in on via Jervis is in excellent condition and appears to be a museum. I'll visit.

I just came here to post that too, watched it a few days ago and it was interesting to see. For me the company was always just cheap cables in the electronic store and old computers at school.

I was not aware of the rich history of the company.

Their product design was nothing short of brilliant. It was Apple well before Apple.

The Macintosh had come out but I don't remember hearing about Jobs visiting. I read later that he met with Sottsass but he when was at Studio Olivetti. (Think meeting Jony Ive at LoveFrom rather than Apple). I remember Gates visited Ivrea. There was a printed list of restaurants with reviews by the expats. One was annotated that Gates had eaten there. It was pretty good.

Gates saw Olivetti as a customer for his MSDOS. Jobs saw Sottsass+Olivetti as a design inspiration.

They were doing brilliant industrial design since well before Apple existed.

> Olivetti had commuter buses in Ivrea and Milan well before Google buses were invented

Italy has both megalopoleis and very sparse small centres. Ivrea is in the northern part of its region (north of Turin); if you consider that the southern half is said to not really have a main city but seven towns of equal beauty and worth (the even lesser ones not really minor), you get the idea of the sub-region as a very sparse megalopolis embedding its countryside.

When enterprises chose to move at least part of their activity from their town of origin to the central area (of Turin) for logistic convenience, it became sensible to organize systems facilitating the movement of your workers, that easily gravitated around the original town.

Edit: as you wrote elsewhere, «[there is a] city to have a job in but then you'd go home [when possible] if you could».

Lovely reminiscences. Are you a Yank? What did you do there?

Yank working there via the Olivetti ATC in Cupertino. Worked on Unix and other stuff. There were quite a few Brits there doing tech writing. A couple of Australians as well. It was very cosmopolitan but it was a deserted city in August. There was even a big concert in July before everyone left for vacation.

Many (most?) of the Italians did not like it but it was work. They really wanted to be home. Same with Milan, a city to have a job in but then you'd go home on weekends if you could.

Fascinating to hear these details. Thanks.

My granddad worked in Olivetti's Buenos Aires factory in the 1960s (he had made foreman due to knowing enough Piedmontese to impress upper management). Workers there had access to:

- Worker's social club, complete with pool

- subsidized housing at cost, rent-to-own

- a wholesale "majorista" style shop where they'd buy in bulk and sell to workers' families at cost.

Say what you want about the fault of paternalism, at least they were thinking about employee welfare. Argentina's economy sucked at the time and they had to close. The factory now produces cigarettes under a phillip morris subsidiary (iirc).

I finally got around to visiting here last spring and it was really interesting. It was beautiful and eerie and a bit dystopian in how everything is abandoned or at least partially abandoned (some buildings are still partially in use). Note that you need to book a tour to go inside any of the buildings, and make sure to choose a day when the tour is in your preferred language. The tour included very detailed explanations of the history and philosophy behind the buildings and the town -- it was also quite long (~4 hrs IIRC). I'd also recommend going into the actual town of Ivrea if you make it out there.

Olivetti also owned ARM/Acorn for a time.

If they had held it, Italy would be playing a much larger role in embedded electronics.

https://www.elleeseymour.com/2012/02/24/how-olivetti-stitche...

The former “Olivetti Study and Research Centre” was also the base of the “Interaction Design Institute Ivrea” (2001–06) where Wiring, Arduino and Processing were born…!

Utopia, Abandoned: The Olivetti Town - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20864548 - Sept 2019 (24 comments)

Absolutely beautiful. I can see that it is now a World Heritage site:

https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/1538/

Ivrea is beautiful. I've been there multiple times for the annual orange-throwing festival. Incredibly fun and recommended.

For the uninitiated: https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/carnival-battle-of-the...

The way i heard the story, after Adriano Olivetti died politics and politicians finally had the chance to sack and split the pie… and split they did.

Carlo De Benedetti is no random john doe. They basically led the decline of olivetti.

They had no vision for the company , and they actually were antagonists to it: Olivetti was an exceptional company that proved wrong both left and right, but proved particularly wrong the left, and they just couldn’t bear it. They just couldn’t bear the living example that it is possible to run a company in a capitalistic manner while also caring for the human beings and treating them well.

So they dismembered it, little by little.

The owner of the company I work for sold it to the big corp. Colleagues remember the times under the owner with a great sadness. He helped everybody in trouble and was super generous. The owner had same revenue with half of the employees of now. There is definitively a way of combining profitability and caring for human beings.

I don’t get it, whenever I read some American commenting on anything I roughly agree with, it invariably takes a sudden turn, devolving into an arbitrary accusation against the Left, Communism or Socialism.

You’re obsessed folks, calm down

I’m not American. You should stop assuming everything happens and only happen in the us.

I’d say that running a profitable company in a socially conscious way is proof that the drive for profit above anything else that characterises capitalism is misguided. Olivetti could be more profitable if they didn’t care so much about the well-being of their workers and their families, but they proved they can, and that is better than maximising shareholder value at any cost.

Olivetti was extremely profitable for the time.

If it could keep their workers with fewer benefits, profits would be higher.

This works for a while - you'll lose your best and brightest, who have no patience for this game, but with enough process layered on top of an unskilled workforce, you can get really far (as Amazon's warehouses can show).

So it’s a race to the bottom, until even the skilled get squeezed… not smart

I am from France and I would say the same thing they do.

The traditional left here has been and still is extremely detrimental to the country as a whole and has kept from their communist roots - that’s where most of the old guard has been formed - an extremely strong tendency towards control where they would rather destroy anything successful not coming from them than see it prosper. It’s even more sad in France because the main left wing party used to be dominated by its social democrat wing and be somewhat apt to govern but is now decimated and subservient to other more extreme parties which are completely disconnected from reality. Not that the right is any better. They are more and more fascist by the day.

We are on a trajectory to do the same mistakes Italy did.

> the same mistakes Italy did

Italy, I understand, also had had a tradition of conciliation and search for common grounds, a call to the common good. (A drive helped by the fight against a common enemy before the half of the past century.)

The grave mistake is polarization, those steps towards a "cold civil war" (that seems now so common around the world).

But before that, allowing the twisted stagnate in their dumb lowly positions (like said taste for «destr[uction]» and «disconnect[ion] from reality»), in the disgregation of the societal spirit - a root of the abovesaid polarization. It is a lurking entropic phenomenon requiring active correction, normally through debate, through "talking", productive confrontation; it is not absent in these pages.