The Olivetti Company | Hacker News Reader

The Olivetti Company

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238 pointsrbanffy68 comments

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.)

Its an incredible story and way another time. As my cousin put it while i was last in ivrea: those factory buildings where like spaceships at that time. Partialy very bad luck, but with all the nostalgia i think adriano was also partialy a bit dreamy and that ultimately came at a cost. On the other side and what rarely gets mentioned: olivetti had a really good and massive sales crew. And that allowed them to spend money on these things.

Ps.Adriano is my biological grandfather. Pps.i posted the link before, but didnt get much traction.

Author here. I’d love to talk to you about your grandfather, Ivrea, and so on if you’re open to it.

Admin at the linked domain.

Sent you a mail

I will love to see the article. If you want reviewers, let me know.

I have fond memories from my Acorn days of staying in the 'typewriter' hotel on visits to Ivrea - it became derelict, but perhaps it has been revived...

https://zoningthegardenstate.wordpress.com/2020/10/04/the-pr...

I am very interested in the Community Movement, Wikipedia is lacking references https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Community_Movement

And also the Waldensians https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waldensians

The Community Movement (Movimento Comunità) was Adriano Olivetti's broader social philosophy: focused on worker participation, cooperative economics, and community-based organization. there is not so much in English, all my knowledge comes from Italian sources. The Italian wikipedia page in the section Bibliografia lists some books in Italian, maybe you'll be able to find them, at least now we have the advantage to be able to translate on the fly. Anyway here http://momoneco.kotka.fi/ivrea_nayttely_4_uk.html there is something about the urban planning.

> 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. > > [...] > > That's why Olivetti succeeded where technically equivalent competitors didn't. They engineered for humans, not just machines.

Two decades ago I randomly found myself in a tiny lecture room with a Very Important Manager from a Very Big European Bank. She started her talk stating "In the '80s, the Italian politics had to choose between the economic model of the Olivetti's family and that of the Agnelli's family. They choose Agnelli's. That was a mistake." Followed by a long string of expletives.

For context and for contrast, the Agnelli family was the owner of FIAT, then the biggest private employers in Italy. They were strongly anti-unions. They even bought the most important newspaper in Turin (the headquartiers of FIAT) to suppress reports of workers initiatives and strikes.

true, '80s were the years that signed the switch from an economy based on products and services (Olivetti) to an economy based on financial papers (Agnelli). If the 1st one was more human sized, the second one forgot about people.

The fall of Berlin wall was signalling that politicians were all with "us".

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

Unfortunately they don't have anymore a corporate culture worth speaking of... These days all you see their brand on is cash registers.

And they don’t even design them anymore - most are just white box designs with their logo attached.

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.

That the impression I had! The mention of the US government pressing Olivetti to sell its electronics division to GE before the mysterious deaths of the main people managing that division does make it look seriously suspicious what happened. The success of US corporations today does not seem to have been only a result of America’s aptitude for business as we tend to think, but also of plain government intervention.

My grandma had Programma 101, it was such an awesome machine

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 :)

I worked in IT support and engineering for a UK Olivetti dealer / distributor in the 1980s/90s. As such I had access to all sorts of Olivetti kit in various states of functionality. At one time, my home PC was an Olivetti M280 case with an M380 (386DX) motherboard and EGA display adapter. It had a colour monitor and the ANK 27-102 keyboard - it was a 'top end' hybrid for its time that I'd put together from several non-working machines..

I also had a 'faulty' Olivetti inkjet printer that was written off under warranty with a mysterious fault. I eventually managed to fix it by bending the metal paper detector arm so that it slotted properly into the optical sensor - it was a little out of whack and the sensor sometimes couldn't work out whether there was paper in the tray.

In North America I think they're remembered as computers that were MS-DOS compatible, but not PC-compatible, and thus kind of a dead end. Like the DEC Rainbow or the Tandy 2000.

Some were, but Olivetti moved into PC compatibles. I’ve used many PC desktops and servers with their brand (and design!).

I have a complaint however. One family of desktops seemed to demand blood sacrifice every time they were serviced. You’d open the machine, replace the failed drive, test, close it up, and a cut would appear in your hand. I don’t remember cutting my hand on the sharp edges inside, but there was always a cut afterwards.

Living in Italy at the time, I recall early Olivetti portable computers back in the ‘80’s. They were out of reach for a teenager though, so had to stick to my BBC Micro. Olivetti was the reference when it came to well-designed machines.

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...

There is a lot of Olivetti in Apple. I am sure Jobs was not oblivious to their history.

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..."

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.

I was 11 when my school got donated an Olivetti 286. This was in the early 2000s and to this day it remains the only one that I've seen and used (it ran MS-DOS 4.0 & came with a manual).

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

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...

HN has some serious competitors for “coolest dad ever”.

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.

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.

Wasn’t it Olivetti that had smart badges that’d use IR to report to in-room receivers so you’d know where someone was and calls could be routed to the nearest phone? I remember they had a trivial do not disturb more - just place the badge face down and the receivers wouldn’t be able to find you.

I don’t remember that. But the phone number to get the Olivetti operator from my apartment out on Gugliemo Jarvis was a single digit like 6. It was after all a company town which BTW emptied out on weekends. People tended to go home.

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

>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.

There are numerous typos in this piece. Somewhat ironic for an article about a company that made typewriters:

"In the 1400s, Ivrea gained small Jewish community..." That one is the second sentence.

"...the company released the Modello Portatile 1, or MP1, create by Gino Martinoli, Adriano Olivetti, Riccardo Levi, Aldo Magnelli, and Adriano Magnelli."

"In 1938, the Italian racial laws made things difficult and dangerous for his wife, Laura, and several of members of his research team."

"Phenolic resin a was cheap, heat-resistant, nonconductive, synthetic plastic first patented in 1907."

"The material ceased being used with arrival of ABS and PVC."

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.

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 Quaderno was a gorgeous little machine. I had the XT one, but later a 386 came out. I wish I had bought it from the company when I left.

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

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.

AT&T also had very strong design in their product lines. The terminals that descended from the Blit, with their square (1:1, not 4:5) CRTs was a thing of beauty. It crushed me to know how few remain and were not responsibly recycled.

As a career, we need to be better at preserving our history.

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.

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

They made some beautiful computers. I really want to, eventually, get an M20, or wait until 3D printers get good enough to print one. ;-)

The M24 was the first computer my family purchased. My dad worked for a bank and in the mid eighties they were modernising that bank and offered employees an option to buy a PC. Since contract went to Olivetti, we got the M24. I remember the evening we picked it up and installed it on the living room table, but I can't clearly remember what year that was, I think it was 1986. My first explorations into programming were on that thing. I must have spent countless of hours with it. An 8086, 640kb of RAM and two floppy drives. Good memories.

I have an Olivetti Lettera 22 typewriter and it's the perfect machine, just immaculately designed. But one thing that absolutely floors me and I have no idea how they did it - is they have infinite, programmable tab stops on a completely manual machine (no electricity). So you can set as many tab stops as you want, and then hit the tab key and it will jump between all of the stops in order. It's great for creating lists of things or for creating simple tables. How the machine is able to remember your settings, and allow you to jump between and clear you tab stops completely mechanically is just so cool to me and seems like a marvel of engineering.

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).

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

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

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

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

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

This is awesome. Combine it with selectric-mode.

> 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.

My favorite is the M-20 though. Chunky and powerful.

Author here. I have a twinge of regret at the end of every article for people and machines that get cut. I try to be happy that at least someone is making the effort, you know?

> I have a twinge of regret at the end of every article for people and machines that get cut.

A valid point.

> I try to be happy that at least someone is making the effort, you know?

For sure. This was a great read, thank you for taking the time to put it together.

Ivrea, industrial city of the 20th century

The industrial city of Ivrea is located in the Piedmont region and developed as the testing ground for Olivetti, manufacturer of typewriters, mechanical calculators and office computers.

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

but also: 'The Mysterious Affair At Olivetti' Attempts To Find A Cold War Conspiracy

https://www.npr.org/2019/11/07/776834206/the-mysterious-affa...

you need to consider that Italy from '50s to 1992 had the powerful communist party in western countries.

It wasn't a mystery a collaboration between Italian companies and Soviet Union. During '70s FIAT transferred know-how to a Soviet carmaker, even a city was named Togliatti (an Italian politician).

That's why Italy was always under CIA control, the period '60-'80s was called "strategia della tensione" (Strategy of Tension), even a Prime Minister was killed in 1978.

For those who likes history and spy stories is interesting to deep dive.

Here is another page about Ivrea, with some history and many many large photos:

https://artsandculture.google.com/story/ivrea-industrial-cit...

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

About 10 years ago I found old mail/letters belonging to my great aunt. One of these lettres did really stand out: just mundane stuff, some insurance invoice, but the font on that letter was a thing of beauty. It took me quite some time but I ended up finding which font was used in that (typerwrited) letter and it was some Olivetti font.

I've got a scan of that letter and reference somewhere and although I don't remember the ref right now, I know I eventually found which font it was here:

https://luc.devroye.org/fonts-96540.html

P.S: I've got great memories of my father smoking cigs while typing on his IBM selectric eletric typewriter.

I'm actually beginning to wonder if I might have learnt to type on an Olivetti as well. That typewriter's been gone over forty years but it may well have been. We did have computers at school (and were barely allowed access), but I taught myself on a typewriter anyway... I had to... My handwriting's awful!

I picked up an Olivetti Lettera 22 last year. It's quite nice; it won a Compasso d'Oro industrial design award.

Adriano Olivetti (1960) Mario Tchou (1961)

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

I had a typewriter with this font. Thanks for the pointer.

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