The invention of the world's first computer. The unknown story of OlivettiIn the '60s a handful of designers worked in semi-clandestinity to invent the first personal computer in history, with the risk of being sold to General Electric along with the rest of the Olivetti computer division.
At the beginning of the 1960s, the idea of putting a computer on a desk was a concept so far from people's imagination that, when Pier Giorgio Perotto came to mind, almost none of Olivetti's senior executives believed that it would be useful for something or someone.
That was the time of the big mainframes, computers that were as big as rooms, gigantic electromechanical systems very expensive and programmed by super technicians in white coats who looked more like crazy scientists than ordinary people.
Olivetti, which produced typewriters and calculators, had already launched itself into the IT market in the 1950s, challenging the American giants under the brilliant guidance of Adriano Olivetti, an enlightened entrepreneur and brilliant mind, the son of Camillo Olivetti, who founded the company in 1908.
The guide of Adriano Olivetti
Adriano Olivetti, engineer, entrepreneur, intellectual, politician, urban planner, publisher, essayist, who had started his career as a worker in his father's company, registered as a subversive by the fascist regime, died suddenly in 1960 due to a cerebral hemorrhage. It was a hard blow to the company, which was succeeded by his son Roberto Olivetti, but it was a serious loss for the whole of civil society, which lost one of the most brilliant and innovative minds of the twentieth century.
Adriano was an entrepreneur who should not only be credited with having brought a company to commercial success, but above all with having created inside and outside his factory a real organized society, with schools, libraries, hospitals and working conditions that have been studied from all over the world, without ever having been replicated.
In Olivetti, at the time of Adriano, there was a cultural ferment and a fertile humus from which brilliant projects were born and in which brilliant minds that characterized the history and culture of Italy in the last century grew.
Adriano Olivetti, defined as a red entrepreneur by the then president of Confindustria, who urged his associates to boycott his products, alone is worth a separate study, but for those who want to know more I leave the link to a RAI History service: Adriano Olivetti - The Red Entrepreneur.
The first computers (not personal)
In the early '60s, computers, especially in the United States, began to enter powerfully into every aspect of everyday life, but they were machines that could only afford the government, the army and some financial giant, were in fact used to manage taxes, make financial calculations and simulate the trajectory of missiles.
There was concern in the population, because they realized that "something was happening" and that this could be dangerous. Someone, interviewed on the street, hypothesized that "one day the government will unite all these computers in a network and we will no longer be free", a fear shared by many. Who could have imagined, in that historical moment, putting a computer on the desk to keep the family accounting or a small company?
Here comes the Program 101, the first personal computer in history
Engineer Perotto at Olivetti had this intuition, while at the same time Steve Jobs, on the other side of the world, was still going around in short pants jumping and running among the apricots of his Silicon Valley, certainly thinking of everything but computer science.
It was 1962 and Perotto's team gave birth to the project Program 101, a completely new and innovative machine in every respect, a computer philosophy that did not exist until then and was destined to change the history of mankind forever. It is with Program 101 that everything was born, she is the progenitor of the dynasty of personal computers.
The challenge was anything but trivial, it was not only a matter of being able to sell a product that no one yet felt the need, but the problem was above all to be able to achieve it, since at the time all the technology was the size of a mainframe and certainly not of a personal computer, starting from the memories that took up half a cubic meter and weighed several pounds, passing through all the other components.
Perotto's team at Olivetti built the first personal computer.
Perotto and his men, or rather boys, since some of them were just nineteen years old and at their first work experience, in two years they solved all the technical challenges and introduced a new type of memory, the magnetostrictive memory, basically a rolled steel wire that represented the turning point that allowed Program 101 to become reality.
But how do you allow the machine to run a pre-programme set up and written by someone else? Here is the other brilliant invention, the magnetic card, a strip of paper with a layer of magnetic paint on which the instructions of a program were stored. Thus was born the father of the floppy disk, the medium that would later become a world standard.
As often happens, it is the fact that we have had a different education, it is that healthy ignorance that only those who have had a different, non-standard path have, which has allowed many innovators in history to have a different point of view and solve a problem in a new, innovative way. It's easier to question the status quo if you haven't grown up in it.
Roberto Olivetti, who inherited part of his father's vision and shared his enthusiasm for Perotto's work, entrusted the design of the machine to a young and promising architect, Mauro Bellini, who had just graduated from the Milan Polytechnic. Today Bellini is the owner of twenty-five design works permanently exhibited at the MoMA in New York.
Bellini designed an office machine that had to be a product to relate to, not a trivial container of electronic circuits and mechanical devices, but an object that had to be integrated into the personal sphere of those who used it. Everything was going well, but in 1964, when we were now a step away from the working Program 101, here is the tragic turning point.
The personal computer Olivetti survives the dismemberment of the company
Olivetti was in economic difficulties and was forced to seek the help of external financiers, to save it intervened a group of entrepreneurs led by FIAT, Pirelli, IMI and Mediobanca, who saved it on condition that it sold the entire electronic division.
According to the new investors, no one in Europe could compete with the American companies in terms of information technology, so they forced Oliva to sell all the information technology sector, which was purchased by the American General Electric.
Everything, except a small piece, just what concerned the Program 101, a project so snubbed by the management to be insignificant, almost non-existent, so that they managed in one night, deleting from all documents concerning the word Calculator and replacing it with Calculator, to make it pass as a simple electromechanical office machine, so as to untie it from the computer department and allow him to stay in the company.