Clever Confidential Ep. 4: Olivetti and the Race to Create the First Personal Computer
Clever Confidential is Clever’s offshoot series, where we dig into the darker side of design - the shadowy, sometimes sordid tales hiding under a glossy topcoat of respectable legacy.
In Episode 4: Olivetti and the Race to Create the First Personal Computer, host Amy Devers and writer Andrew Wagner unravel a captivating story that challenges our assumptions about the origins of the personal computer. Many credit Silicon Valley with this innovation, but should we really look elsewhere.
Olivetti was founded in 1908 by Camillo Olivetti. This Italian powerhouse thrived under his son Adriano, who revolutionized industrial design with a human-centered approach, merging aesthetics with user experience. Olivetti became a titan in office machines and desktop computing, poised to lead the charge into a new technological era.
But as Olivetti rises, dark clouds gather. Adriano and brilliant engineer Mario Tchou meet mysterious and untimely fates, shrouded in Cold War intrigue and fierce corporate rivalry. Despite these tragic losses, Olivetti unveiled the Programma 101 in 1965, hailed as the world’s first desktop computer, forever altering our perception of technology.
So why has Olivetti’s remarkable legacy faded into obscurity? We peel back the layers of this enigma, revealing a web of intrigue—mysterious deaths, hostile takeovers, potential CIA involvement, and hidden narratives that reshaped the tech landscape and distorted our collective cultural memory.
Many thanks to this episode’s guest expert Barry Katz.
Audio clips courtesy of Luca Cottini from his Italian Innovators youtube video - CAMILLO & ADRIANO OLIVETTI. At the Origins of the Computer Age. You can find him on Linkedin and instagram @italianinnovators
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Amy Devers: Hey Clever listeners… today we have a special presentation - another episode of our spin-off series, Clever Confidential, where we dig into the darker side of design… Enjoy!
Luca Cottini: Olivetti designed not just a product, but also its pieces, its space, its surroundings, and its city, Ivrea…. So top designers like Marcello Nizzoli, Ettore Sozza's Mario Bellini authored some of Olivetti's products, making them memorable pieces of Italian industrial are…. Even after Adriano's sudden death in 1960, the company continued to advance his vision by developing typewriting into computing into an aesthetic form or lifestyle.
Amy Devers: In 1908, in the sleepy Turin suburb of Ivrea, Italy, Camillo Olivetti started his eponymous company that would become synonymous with Italian industrial design. What began as a simple typewriter manufacturer would blossom into a full blown Technological powerhouse under the guidance of Camillo's son, Adriano.
By the mid-century, Olivetti, renowned for bringing a sophisticated and humanizing, design sensibility to the development of their office machines and retail environments, were also a global frontrunner in computing innovation, and were leading the pack in the advent of desktop computing.
The through line from Olivetti to Silicon Valley, and Olivetti’s influence on Steve Jobs in particular, is well-documented. And we can feel the ethos of Olivetti reverberating throughout Apple products and the larger technology landscape today.
However, Olivetti’s contribution to the realm of tech innovation and personal computing has fallen away from our cultural narrative. Zooming in on history reveals a grainy, low-res image, conspicuously absent of detail…
But there remains a little known story of significant international intrigue containing mysterious deaths, the CIA, corruption, plenty of conspiracy theories, a– nd the frantic race to develop the world's first personal computer.
Amy Devers: I'm Amy Devers, and this is Clever Confidential, where we dig into the lesser told stories of the darker side of design, the shadowy, sometimes sordid tales hiding under a glossy topcoat of respectable legacy. This is Episode 4: Olivetti and the Race to Create the First Personal Computer. And with me as always, is writer and editor Andrew Wagner.
Amy Devers: Olivetti, having survived two World Wars, really began to hit its stride with the dawning of the Cold War and the rapid advancement of computer technology in the late 1940s. In 1948, it would release the game changing Divisumma calculator, followed in 1959 by the first Italian designed electronic computer, the Elea 9003.
Though the Elea kept with computer technology of the times, taking up nearly a tennis court's worth of space and sporting monitors as big as vending machines, Olivetti was forcing the world to stand up and take note of its capacity for innovation. Ultimately, this spotlight would be to Olivetti's detriment, as everyone always wants to take down the king of the hill.
In February of 1960, at the age of 58, Adriano Olivetti would die a mysterious death aboard a train en route to Switzerland. A fate ultimately ruled a heart attack. But one that continues to be debated to this day. And in November of 1961, Mario Tchou, Olivetti's lead engineer, and one of the world's greatest computer scientists at the time, would perish in an equally confounding car crash.
The two deaths of key Olivetti leadership in rapid succession set the stage for the company's early stumbles, it's eventual takeover by American stalwart General Electric, and the end of its influence as technological pioneer. In 1963, despite reeling from the deaths of Adriano and Tchou, Olivetti still had momentum and would continue its design and manufacturing prowess.
And, raise the hackles of the United States government by finally purchasing the American bedrock company Underwood Typewriter, of which it had held a controlling stake since 1959. The United States at the time was intent on showing the Soviet Union, and the rest of the world, who the true industrial heavyweight was.
And if the newly installed president, Lyndon B. Johnson, had anything to do with it, it surely wasn't going to be Italy. But despite its successes, Olivetti was wounded. The purchase of Underwood proved to be an albatross around its neck. And in 1964, to stop the flow of red ink, Olivetti would be forced into selling off its electronic processing division to General Electric.
However, Olivetti continued to pursue their own technological revolution, developing new computing products under the Olivetti, read: Italian, flag, and pushing innovation further than it ever had before. This last gasp as a technological innovator was enabled by some impressive corporate sleight of hand.
As the GE Olivetti deal was worked out over a matter of weeks, an Olivetti employee named Gastone Garziera was able to keep their biggest breakthrough, which had been under development for the last decade, from becoming part of the sale to GE by recategorizing it from computer to calculator. And with that bit of magic, in 1965, Olivetti finally unveiled the Programma 101. What's widely considered the world's first desktop computer.
The Programma's reduction in size was remarkable and would be a huge part of shifting the public perception of computers from contraptions only for the corporate elite into tools that would enable humanistic endeavors eventually accessible by a huge swath of the world's population.
With the Programma, Olivetti had seemingly cemented its place in the history books. But Garziera's recategorization of the product from computer to calculator had muddied the waters and Olivetti's reputation, leaving the door open for something Americans have long been very well versed in, revisionist history.
Andrew Wagner: The history of Olivetti is a very long and winding road, filled with the drama that almost all family affairs seem to offer up. But the company's steps towards technological evolution and revolution in the 50s and 60s added an extra layer of mystery to the plotline. Olivetti had been led by Adriano Olivetti, the son of founder Camillo, since the 1930s.
By all accounts, Adriano was a brilliant mind who had the knack and good fortune of surrounding himself with other brilliant minds, like that of Mario Tchou, Olivetti's leading engineer since 1954, when Adriano recruited him from his professorship at Columbia University. As the two ramped up Olivetti's research and development into computing, they garnered the attention of governmental agencies of all sorts, perhaps most notably the U.S. Office of Strategic Services, or the OSS, a predecessor to the CIA.
At the time, in the thick of the Cold War era, U. S. Italian relations were complicated, and Olivetti's willingness to search out partners for their research with the Soviet Union and China did not exactly make things less so. Writer Bradley Babendir paints the scene particularly well in his review of Meryl Seacrest's 2019 book, The Mysterious Affair at Olivetti.
“Italy seemed to the United States an important front in the Cold War, and the Olivetti Company was seeking expansion into various places, including Mao Zedong's China, where that option to open up to them. This, alongside Olivetti's purchase of Underwood, an American competitor, would theoretically have made the company an object of scorn in the eyes of powerful American interests at a time when they were very concerned with spreading influence across the world. Additionally, Adriano Olivetti dedicated his life to a utopian quasi socialist vision that, despite being anti communist and never particularly popular, could have irked United States officials.”
But none of this was a particular concern to Adriano and Tchou. As they seemed to tick off win after win for the Olivetti Company in the 1950s, continuing to build the company's strength and readying it for its biggest victories.
All of this would start to unravel in 1960 when Adriano would mysteriously die at the age of 58 on a train. Though the cause of his death was ruled to be of natural causes, Seacrest notes in her book that the doctor could not be sure and recommended that the family order an autopsy. Most accounts ignore the uncertainty and state this verdict as authoritative. No autopsy was ordered.
Seacrest goes on, pointing to a documentary produced by famed Italian horror film director Michele Soavi, Adriano's nephew, wherein Adriano's bodyguard says bluntly, “I know that he was murdered.” Seacrest continues, writing, “Curiously, the CIA created a particularly handy weapon for train corridor use. The Poison Gun, one that mimicked a heart attack.”
The plot thickened shortly after Adriano's death, when his office was ransacked during his funeral, and an early prototype of the Programma 101 was stolen. And then the twist got, shall we say, twistier, when in 1961, Mario Tchou would meet his fate in a car crash, killing him instantly.
Bradley Babendir again writes of this incident in his review of Seacrest's book. “Tchou died in a car wreck on a notoriously dangerous road. There was initially little suspicion about what occurred. Seacrest likens it to the death of General George Patton, who is believed to have died as a result of a car accident, until a member of the Office of Special Services, a World War II era precursor to the CIA, allegedly admitted in an interview with author Robert Wilcox that he was ordered to assassinate Patton. This is still not considered the official story regarding Patton's death. A mention does not even appear on his Wikipedia page.
But Seacrest cites the incident as evidence that this type of thing does happen. She also references the argument of an auto body shop founder, Jose Zamera, who assessed the pictures of Tchou's accident and believes the car was not hit squarely on as the reports suggest. Other details are fishy as well. It was reported that Tchou's driver was drunk and the car smelled overwhelmingly of alcohol, but neither man drank.”
Though Olivetti had lost its two main driving forces in Adriano and Tchou, it was still on track to be the first to commercially release a desktop computer. And thanks to Tchou's right hand man at Olivetti, an engineer named Pier Giorgio Perotto, and the deft relabeling of the Programma 101 by Gastone Garziera, they did.
At the Programma's official unveiling at New York's World Fair in 1964, people were shocked by its small size and fast computational skills. The New York Times and the Wall Street Journal both gave it front page billing, and Hewlett Packard ordered 100 units. Soon thereafter, they would release a competing product.
Olivetti would sue and win, but with Adriano and Tchou gone, Olivetti would never regain the prominence it had enjoyed for two decades.
Luca Cottini: or my absolute favorite, the Valentine by Ettore Sottsass, released in 1968, at the time of the sexual and political revolution.
With its red plated body, the Valentine embodied a sexy way of life, And as the first portable typewriter, it visualized, as a philosophical object, the liberation of writers from any spatial constraints.
Amy Devers: Despite attempts to uncover the truths that seem to still be buried in the story of the great race to release the world's first personal computer. There remain an untold number of questions and very few answers. To help us try and decipher some more of this tangled web, we enlisted the help of Barry Katz, a California College of the Arts and Stanford industrial design professor with a surprising trifecta of attributes to help us get to the bottom of this mystery.
Barry Katz: I'm Barry Katz. I live in Palo Alto, California, sometimes thought of as the capital of Silicon Valley. I am a professor of interaction design and industrial design at California College of the Arts in San Francisco and also at Stanford University where I am in the Department of Mechanical Engineering.
I have written extensively about two themes that are under consideration today, one of which is the History of Design and particularly the rise of the design professions in Silicon Valley and the other curiously enough is the history of the U. S. intelligence agencies.
Andrew Wagner: So, that brings us to Olivetti. I was not aware of Olivetti's, um, Play in the technological world or the technology field in the rapidly developing technology field at that time, late fifties, early sixties.
Andrew Wagner: What can you tell us about that?
Barry Katz: First, um, I should, um, say Olivetti was one of the pioneers in computing. I think it was 1959 that they presented to the world, uh, a mainframe system called the Elea, E L E A. Uh, which stands for a bunch of things in Italian, but also references the Eleatic school of philosophy in ancient Greece, um, which already tells you a little bit about some of the cultural underpinnings of that company. And as they were working on that, uh, that project, they. Uh, hired Sottsass to design the Elea computer system.
So this is back at the, uh, in the 1950s already, when designers were really not doing anything like that at all, anywhere. Computers were refrigerator-sized pieces of hardware. And at best, if an industrial designer was brought into IBM in San Jose or something like that, it would be to figure out how to stuff it into a box.
So, Sottsass looked at the brief and announced that he was totally lost. He didn't have the slightest idea what this thing was, what it was supposed to do. Um, he had no technical training, uh, to speak of, uh, but, uh, took on the project and his approach was very interesting. This is long before the computer as a consumer device was even remotely in anybody's, um, line of vision.
But his approach was, uh, had one really interesting feature to it, which is he took these refrigerator-sized units and he shrank them vertically so that none of them was more than about shoulder height. So what's the big deal about that? The big deal was he didn't want an environment in which people walked in, the technicians, and were overwhelmed by the machinery, by the technology. He wanted to create some kind of a balance between the human operator and the machine so that when you're at one of these consoles, you could see everybody else, all of the other fellow human beings. And not just a lot of large inscrutable boxes, perhaps with magnetic reels on them or whatever.
And that was, um, already, I think, quite striking, you know, how successful it was, um, that's, you know, a more complicated story, but the principle of establishing a balance between the human being and the technology, uh, that was there from the beginning. And he brought that, uh, to pretty much all of the work that he subsequently did with Olivetti.
Including you mentioned the Valentine typewriter. Um, he called that an anti machine. He said, I wanted to create a machine that a poet will take to the park and sit under a tree. And write a love sonnet, you know, not something that would, would feel like a hunk of hardware that was oppressing you.
But it was more than just a manufacturing company because Adriano in particular, when I say visionary, I really mean it. He was such an impressive individual. He thought of the company, not simply as a manufacturing entity, but as a human community. So he pioneered concept of today, we call it, we use the cliche work life balance of paying what seemed to many people extravagantly inflated wages of providing housing. For his employees and not simply dormitory barracks, but, um, these, uh, wonderful domestic facilities with cultural amenities and libraries and really, uh, uh, uh, kind of a social vision of what a company and in particular, a tech company could be.
He also was passionate about the design of products. And so in addition to Sottsass he had brought in the pioneering figure, Mario Bellini, who had been given responsibility for designing many of the products, including what will become what's regarded as the first desktop computer, the Programma 101.
In terms of design, Olivetti brought in one after another, Zanuso, Bellini, Sottsass, some of the most influential names in the world Design were working with and working for Olivetti. Bellini in particular was sort of the court designer for Olivetti's products. And the idea there was, was always about not simply styling, but humanizing a product.
This could not have happened if computing had not begun to make the moves that it was doing as it's getting smaller and smaller and more and more accessible. So it starts to be, to become an issue of how we turn, you know, a massive rack of technology into a product that is humane and humanely scaled.
The impact on Italian design will be, will be huge because Some of the people that I just mentioned did not simply work on office machines for Olivetti. They expanded out into furniture and lifestyle and domestic accessories of every sort. And to the extent that they had an original base in Olivetti, I think we have Adriano Olivetti to thank for much of that.
Andrew Wagner: You know, I'd love to hear what you think, how these events impacted not only Olivetti, but also Italian design and Italy as a country. Um, what effect did that have on the trajectory of the design and technological world in Italy?
Barry Katz: The importance and the influence and the impact of what Olivetti did in the realm of, again, as I like to put it, bringing design to technology, It can't be overstated. It was massive. It was the real flagship. In some ways, I have great reverence for Olivetti. I think that's probably coming through and quite honestly, every American designer of my generation, everybody who was here in the late 70s and early 80s and trying to figure out how to bring design to the tech industries.
If you ask any of them, they will say that Olivetti was their model. As I think, you know, I've written extensively about that period in Silicon Valley history, and I am stating a raw fact, Olivetti was revered as the company that brought design to technology. And at a period in American design history, when the idea of bringing design to technology was to paint an avocado green.
Both: [laughs]
Barry Katz: This, this was, um, people were just blown away when they saw Olivetti products.
Amy Devers: And so before we get into the theories, what kind of notice did the U.S. take, um, when Olivetti acquired Underwood? And how would that have, I don't know, would that have ruffled feathers?
Barry Katz: Underwood was probably the most respected office machinery company in the U.S. And when I say office machinery, I'm talking typewriters and adding machines. Um, nothing like computers. Uh, at all, but a very traditional company in many respects and Olivetti made a big corporate move, today we talk about M&A mergers and acquisitions. So they acquired Underwood as an attempt to gain a beachhead into the American markets.
Amy Devers: Mm hmm.
Barry Katz: Uh, very familiar story. I mean, we see that almost every day. Read about it in the Wall Street Journal. So that's what was behind the acquisition of Underwood, an attempt to penetrate the U. S. market and ally with a very respected brand. Whether that caught the attention of, uh, U. S. trade commissions, uh, all the way up to the intelligence agencies, that I simply don't know.
So, uh, yeah, there will be, um, A growing interest on the part of GE, again, not in the Underwood side of the story, but I think in the Olivetti side of it, because Olivetti had by this time become the preeminent European company in computing. And that's an area that is attracting growing attention in industrial circles in the U.S.
There is nonetheless, um, an effort to build a machine that would be accessible, small, lightweight. It had only 14 commands that had to be learned. So, um, the impulse behind it, and I, I think, uh, Peratto said this, again, the engineer behind it, That this is something, no actually it wasn't him, it was an advertising poster that I read that said something to the effect of an incompetent secretary can learn how to use this thing in a couple of days.
Barry Katz: Now, today if you can't pop open your laptop and intuitively engage the interface within seconds, we consider it a bomb. Um, but the idea that a reasonably qualified. non technical person could sit down at a computer and start using it in a, after a day or two of reading an accessible instruction manual. And that the thing was attractive. It wasn't this, you know, scary, monstrous machine.
Amy Devers: Thank you, Mario Bellini.
Barry Katz: Thank you, Mario Bellini. Well, Bellini, he recalled the day he received a call from Roberto Olivetti. That sounds so much like the stories that I would hear about Silicon Valley in the 80s and 90s, and Roberto said, I want to see you. In connection with a complex project that we are working on, and as Bellini began to think about it, it turned out it was not to be a box that would contain mechanisms and printed circuits, but a personal object. Something that would sit on your desk or on your table and that you could relate to as almost as a piece of your personal furniture or stuff that you carry around with you.
Although I have to say that the, uh, the program weighed between 65 and 80 pounds. So you were not schlepping the thing around and, you know, putting it on the, uh, the tray table of your airplane. Right. Why did it, um. Not go beyond that. I think it had to do with the demise of the organization of Olivetti.
Demise is a bit too strong a word. Olivetti still exists in skeletal form. But the ethos of computing and the infrastructure of computing was passing irrevocably westward across the Atlantic to the U. S. to sites in the East Coast, digital equipment company, and in the West Coast, especially the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center.
And there was just way too much muscle involved, and frankly, way too much talent for Olivetti's machine to resist. In its day, however, it was a very successful product. They sold, um, I think the, uh, the number is 4,200 or 4,300 of them were sold. It went through a couple of models, the two or three models.
And although, uh, the price tag, uh, $3,200, going up to $3,500, which is about $20,000 in today's money. It sounds like a fair amount of change, but if you compare it to the cost of renting an hour of time on an IBM 360. At $115,000 a day, this was nothing, and it was the first step in transforming computing into a piece of office equipment.
So when I read some of the statements that Bellini made about the Programma 101, again, 1965, it echoes almost eerily with things that I have heard Steve Jobs say about turning computing into, you know, the famous phrase of Apple, the computer for the rest of us. You don't have to be a computer scientist or an electrical engineer to operate the thing. You can be, you know, a small business owner. You can be, um, a junior high school student.
And for that to happen, it's not just a question of making it look good. And, you know, sleek and elegant, but intuitively operable and in an interactive way that, um, the Programma 101 was never an interactive device and that element of interactivity was starting to be an issue at about the same time in Silicon Valley, still in a laboratory context. That's Douglas Engelbart at the Stanford Research Institute, and it's the, um, the group of people at Xerox PARC that built the Alto, which is the first really interactive. desktop computing environment. And from that, it's, uh, it's really a straight line, which I have in my own work attempted to draw to Apple and to where we are now.
Amy Devers: I have a question, a sort of just general overview, historical perspective question, which is in the 1960s, the early 1960s, how important would it have been globally to be seen as the inventor of the first personal computing machine.
Barry Katz: 1960s. When Olivetti showed the Programma 10 in New York at the World's Fair, first showed it at a, uh, at a business, um, meeting that was held actually at the Waldorf Astoria the year before, but when it was shown to the public, In, at the World's Fair, it caused a sensation and, you know, what, what would I compare it to, you know, Jeff Bezos saying we're on the edge of space tourism or Google saying we are about to present to the world a car that doesn't need a driver. You know, these are sort of tropes that had been circulating in science fiction and in the kind of loony edges of Of the engineering world for some time, so I'd say the Programma is, um, the first step in moving from the kind of kind of science fiction idea that some people had been talking about to making it real.
Barry Katz: And it's happening in a number of places, not just in Olivetti, although they were the first to cross the finish line, I think, with a product.
Amy Devers: So, okay, here's my speculation for such a pioneering company, both in the sort of understanding of human factors and designing technology so that it interfaces with your life in a meaningful way, and pioneers of data processing and computing, I could see why they might be a target.
Barry Katz: Well, again, um, I wouldn't rule out anything. Okay. So I'll, I'll drop this one on you. Um, If I had to go head to head with, um, the CIA or with General Electric, I think I'd take on the CIA. Um, I think the power of corporate America is scarier. Wow.
Amy Devers: You just terrified me. I'm not going to sleep tonight. Yeah, that is scary.
Andrew Wagner: That was very scary.
Luca Cottini: It all started with a visit of a young engineer to Edison's labs, and a dream sparked by this encounter.
Almost 90 years later, the same encounter which passed on from father to son was handed over in Aspen to another dreamer who saw in technology a way to impact, design, and imagine a future world.
Amy Devers: Though Olivetti's design skills are still revered today, particularly in Silicon Valley, Their legacy as a technological leader and innovator has been casually erased. Mario Tchou, for his part, led a team of over 500 engineers at the height of his time with Olivetti, and his leadership and engineering talents led to the development and eventual release of what many consider to be the world's first desktop computer.
However, despite being one of the great computing minds of the 20th century, he's rarely mentioned in any English language text. This alone warrants deeper exploration. This story strikes right at the heart of the distrust of big government and even bigger corporations that is so prevalent today, and for good reason.
And while we are not ones to go diving down the rabbit holes created by conspiracy theories headfirst, we do consider ourselves healthy skeptics and critical thinkers. And if anything demands for hard questions to be continually asked, it's the stories that Silicon Valley, the CIA, big media, and the government at large have chosen to tell us and expect us to believe hook, line, and sinker.
Amy Devers: Thank you for listening to Clever Confidential. To see images of Olivetti’s Programma 101 and more, head to cleverpodcast.com.
While you’re there, you can listen to the first 3 episodes of Clever Confidential and stay tuned for our next episode - we will be delving into the forever fascinating story of Eileen Gray and her E-1027 house.
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Special thanks to Barry Katz for lending his expertise, insight, and colorful commentary, and to Paul Cloutier of Humboldt, Kansas for bringing this story to our attention. To Meryl Secrest for writing “The Mysterious Affair at Olivetti,” the book that got Andrew all fired up, and to Bradley Babendir for the quotes from his review of Meryl Secrest’s book.
The audio clip at the top of the show is courtesy of Luca Cottini from his Italian Innovators youtube video - "CAMILLO & ADRIANO OLIVETTI: At the Origins of the Computer Age" you can find him on Linkedin and instagram @italianinnovators
Our huge thanks to Camille Stennis and Mark Zurawinski for editing, sound design and general audio wizardry, and to Ilana Nevins for heavy duty production assistance.
Our theme music is “Astronomy” by Thin White Rope from their album “In a Spanish Cave” courtesy of Frontier Records.
Clever Confidential is produced by Devers Endeavors,.. be sure to check out our other show, Clever, for revelatory conversations with creative visionaries.
Barry Katz: As I mentioned, I had the, uh, I don't want to call it the honor, but the opportunity to present some of my findings to an audience at the CIA. And following that inauspicious event, there was a big reception in the rotunda of the Library of Congress. And, uh, I was by this time, thoroughly drunk, um, and, uh, coming down off of a very chilly reception.
Barry Katz: And, um, an elderly gentleman came up to me and said something to the effect of, uh, Professor Katz, I really enjoyed your book, but you left out the group that I was part of. And I had honestly heard this many times. Everybody who served in any part of the, the military or intelligence has a story to tell.
Barry Katz: Which of course you want to respect and honor, but I started, you know, my kind of polite disclaimer, I couldn't tell everybody's story. And in any case, I'm done with that stuff. I just took a job at a design school and I'm making a 90 degree turn in my career. I'm done with intelligence. I'm done with spokes.
Barry Katz: And I, uh, I had become interested in design and he said, okay, um, I got it. Nonetheless, um, take this. And he handed me an envelope. And, uh, said, if anything in here is of further interest to you, give me a call sometime. So I thanked him and looked around for the nearest wastebasket, which I couldn't find because I was too drunk.
Barry Katz: But, um, a couple of hours later, back in my hotel room, uh, somewhat sobered up, I found the envelope in my pocket, opened it up, and it contained a list of the names of all of the people in his group within the office of strategic services. His group was called the Visual Presentation Branch, and, uh, it, uh, the list contained the names of almost every designer I had ever heard of.
Programma 101, Credit: Catalogo collezioni, Wikimedia Commons
In 1908, in the sleepy Turin suburb of Ivrea, Italy, Camillo Olivetti started his eponymous company that would become synonymous with Italian industrial design. What began as a simple typewriter manufacturer would blossom into a full blown Technological powerhouse under the guidance of Camillo's son, Adriano.
By the mid-century, Olivetti, renowned for bringing a sophisticated and humanizing, design sensibility to the development of their office machines and retail environments, were also a global frontrunner in computing innovation, and were leading the pack in the advent of desktop computing.
Programma 101, Wikimedia Commons.
Valentine typewriter. Wikimedia Commons, Photo by Maksym Kozlenko
The through line from Olivetti to Silicon Valley, and Olivetti’s influence on Steve Jobs in particular, is well-documented. And we can feel the ethos of Olivetti reverberating throughout Apple products and the larger technology landscape today…
However, Olivetti’s contribution to the realm of tech innovation and personal computing has fallen away from our cultural narrative. Zooming in on history reveals a grainy, low-res image, conspicuously absent of detail…
Divisumma calculator, Wikimedia Commons
Roberto Olivetti (left) and Mario Tchao (right). Wikimedia Commons. Credit: GiuseppeRao88
Carlo Scarpa, Olivetti Showroom stairs. Wikimedia Commons. Credit: seier+seier
But there remains a little known story of significant international intrigue containing mysterious deaths, the CIA, governmental corruption, plenty of conspiracy theories, and the frantic race to develop the world's first personal computer.
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Credits:
Hosts: Amy Devers & Andrew Wagner
Writing and research: Amy Devers, Andrew Wagner, Ilana Nevins
Guests: Barry Katz
Editing and Sound Design: Camille Stennis and Mark Zurawinski
Theme Music: “Astronomy” by Thin White Rope courtesy of Frontier Records
Logo design: Laura Jaramillo remixed by Graham Hauser
Production: Devers Endeavors
