Olivetti began as a typewriter manufacturer in Ivrea, Italy in 1908. Under Adriano Olivetti, the company expanded into adding machines, accounting machines and mechanical calculators. By the 1950s Olivetti was noteworthy for combining engineering and manufacturing with confident modern industrial design. An important figure in this regard was Mario Bellini who commenced his career as an architect with Olivetti but rapidly evolved into one of the most important industrial designers of the 20th century.
Olivetti’s successful typewriter and adding machine businesses gave it great mechanical expertise but the company also recognised the new field of electronic logic and in 1959 delivered one of the first fully transistorised computers, the ELEA 9003. One can imagine some tension between the old-established mechanical office machine divisions and the newly developed electronic machines. These tensions may have been exacerbated by the death of company founder Adriano Olivetti in 1960 and lead electronic computer designer Mario Tchou in 1961. Olivetti struggled thereafter to develop its mainframe computer business and left this field in 1964, transferring its electronic computer business to a separate General Electric controlled business.
Olivetti maintained its large mechanical office machine business and Roberto Olivetti (Adriano’s son, who had taken over after his father) was a strong supporter of the new electronic technologies. He asked Pier Giorgio Perotto, an electronics engineer from the Olivetti computer division, to develop an electronic desktop calculator. Electronic design was done by Giovanni De Sandre and the result was the Olivetti Programma 101, the first of a series of important Perotto-designed Olivetti calculators.
The Programma 101 was released in 1964 and vies for the title of first programmable personal electronic calculator. It was a great success with around 50,000 machines sold, the vast majority in the USA. The Logos 238 was a reduced-capability version of the P101, sharing its discrete transistor technology and mechanical parts. It arrived too late, integrated circuits had rendered its transistor technology obsolete and expensive, it sold poorly, had a short life and is a very rare machine today.
Pier Giorgio Perotto maintained a strong vision of electronic calculators as tools that should have high usability and be parts of larger useful systems. His team of electronic engineers and industrial designers applied integrated circuits and a practical, stylish user interface to produce the Logos 250/270 machines that restored Olivetti’s electronic calculator status after the Logis 238. The team went on to develop two broad product lines:
- Desktop Calculators such as Logos 250/270, Logos 50/60, Divisummas. These used increasing levels of microelectronics to provide capablity at low cost and all featured modernist, user-oriented designs. Some have become aestheic icons of mid-century technology. Olivetti personal calculators continued to be designed in-house according to this philosophy until well into the 1980s.
- Calculating Systems such as P203, P602, P603. These are based on electronic calculators but are interfaced with printers, typewriters and other peripherals to form office machines for specific accounting applications. These machines were successful in their day but were displaced by the rise of the microprocessor and personal computer at the end of the 1970s.
Olivetti is can be somewhat overlooked among the early calculator manufacturers and this fails to give credit for many important important contributions to the field including:
- Pier Giorgio Perotto pioneering electronic and systems designer
- Programma 101 Calculator one of the very first programmable personal calculators
- Mario Bellini highly influential industrial and usability designer