alt Hacker NewsThe Olivetti Company
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Daaamn... Olivetti.
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Such a nice memory :)
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%."
My dad would often bring home an Olivetti M21 "portable" (quotes deliberate - that thing weighed a lot). Really gorgeous design for its time though.
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.
Very interesting article. I still have a working Olivetti M24 at home that I occasionally turn on just for the sake of nostalgia.
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 namesake for this emacs minor mode for writing: https://github.com/rnkn/olivetti
Adriano Olivetti (1960) Mario Tchou (1961)
We had an electric Olivetti typewriter at home when I was growing up before we got a word processor/pc
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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.)