How Olivetti Designed the First Private Pc in Historical past, the Programma 101 (1965)
In the event you have been to return throughout an Olivetti Professionalgramma 101, you probably wouldn’t recognize it as a computer. With its 36 keys and its paper-strip printer, it’d strike you as some sort of oversized including machine, albeit an unusually handsome one. However then, you’d anticipate that quality from Olivetti, a company finest remembered for its enormously successful kindwriters that now occupy prime area in museums of twentieth-century design. Amongst its much lesser-known products, a minimum of outfacet its native Italy, are its computers, a line that started with predominantframes within the mid-nineteen-fifties and finished with IBM PC clones within the nineties, attaining the peak of its innovation with the Professionalgramma 101 in 1965.
The Professionalgramma 101 is also called the P101 or the Perottina, a reputation derived from that of its inventor, engineer Pier Giorgio Perotto. “I dreamed of a pally machine to which you can delegate all these menial duties that are susceptible to errors,” he later stated, “a machine that would quietly be taught and pertype duties, that would retailer simple information and instructions, that could possibly be utilized by anyone, that may be inexpensive and the dimensions of other workplace products which people used.”
To actualize that imaginative and prescient required not only a technical effort but additionally an aesthetic one, which fell to the younger architect and industrial designer Mario Bellini, who had followed his colleague (and later Memphis Group founder) Ettore Sottsass into consulting work for Olivetti.
All this work happened at a time of crisis for the company. Following the dying of its head Adriano Olivetti in 1960, writes Opinionated Designer, it “received into extreme financial difficulties after purchaseing the enormous US Underneathwooden company, and the electronics division was offered off to General Electric early in 1965.” Olivetti’s son Roberto had already “given the go-ahead in 1962 for the development of a small ‘desk-top’ computer.” So as “to keep away from their mission being swallowed up by GE, Perotto’s crew modified a few of the specifications of the 101 to make it look like a ‘calculator’ relatively than a ‘computer’ which meant the mission might stick with Olivetti.” But on a technical level, the Perottina remained very a lot a computer certainly.
In addition to subtraction, multiplication, and division, “it might additionally pertype logical operations, conditional and unconditional jumps, and print the information saved in a register, all by way of a custom-made alphanumeric professionalgramming language,” writes Ricautomotivedo Bianchini at Inexhibit. In the video above, enthusiast Wladimir Zaniewski demonstrates its capabilities with a simple alphanumeric lunar-lander sport: a historically apt mission, since NASA purchased ten of them to be used in planning the Apollo 11 moon landing. But much more important was the gadget’s comparatively down-to-earth obtainment of being, in Bianchini’s phrases, “an unintimidating object eachone might use, even at dwelling. In that sense, there is no such thing as a doubt that the Olivetti Professionalgramma 101 truly is the primary personal computer in history.”
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Based mostly in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His initiatives embody the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the e-book The Statemuch less Metropolis: a Stroll by way of Twenty first-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facee-book.
