alt Hacker NewsExcellent 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.