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.)
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.
Author here. I’d love to talk to you about your grandfather, Ivrea, and so on if you’re open to it.
Admin at the linked domain.
Sent you a mail
Daaamn... Olivetti.
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Such a nice memory :)
I worked in IT support and engineering for a UK Olivetti dealer / distributor in the 1980s/90s. As such I had access to all sorts of Olivetti kit in various states of functionality. At one time, my home PC was an Olivetti M280 case with an M380 (386DX) motherboard and EGA display adapter. It had a colour monitor and the ANK 27-102 keyboard - it was a 'top end' hybrid for its time that I'd put together from several non-working machines..
I also had a 'faulty' Olivetti inkjet printer that was written off under warranty with a mysterious fault. I eventually managed to fix it by bending the metal paper detector arm so that it slotted properly into the optical sensor - it was a little out of whack and the sensor sometimes couldn't work out whether there was paper in the tray.
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%."
Unfortunately they don't have anymore a corporate culture worth speaking of... These days all you see their brand on is cash registers.
I worked for Olivetti (outside Italy) on their Point of Sale systems. That division also made ATMs and amazing printers for printing in passport and savings booklets. That printer could lift the print head to skip over the staple in the middle of the booklet and then merrily continue printing.
As a developer it was great, they handed out these gorgeous M380 XP9 machines to everyone “, check out the boot sequence: https://www.instagram.com/reel/DQCF9GsiJrd/
It was while working there that I started to appreciate that design of things you use every day is important.
Back in the 1950s Olivetti was famous for its striking, modernist showrooms, with typewriters and calculators displayed on pedestals like works of art.
It's been said that they inspired the Apple stores.
https://www.archdaily.com/155074/ad-classics-olivetti-showro...
https://www.printmag.com/daily-heller/the-daily-heller-i-los...
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.
I was 11 when my school got donated an Olivetti 286. This was in the early 2000s and to this day it remains the only one that I've seen and used (it ran MS-DOS 4.0 & came with a manual).
I restored a beautiful 1946 Olivetti last year, having had nothing to do with typewriters beforehand. I just happened to see it on marketplace and pulled the trigger.
It needed a good clean, and some parts needed bent back into shape, but after that it worked like a dream. The mechanism for the tab stops is fantastic.
Also about olivetti: Olivetti & the Italian Computer: What Could Have Been. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vfMxcrN90PE
See also this lovely typeface revival. https://lineto.com/typefaces/valentine
Somewhat apropos is this excellent video I just watched yesterday where Olivetti's graphics were touched on:
I remember them for their luggables. ‘Portable’ computers in the 80s.
Very interesting article. I still have a working Olivetti M24 at home that I occasionally turn on just for the sake of nostalgia.
The M24 was the first computer my family purchased. My dad worked for a bank and in the mid eighties they were modernising that bank and offered employees an option to buy a PC. Since contract went to Olivetti, we got the M24. I remember the evening we picked it up and installed it on the living room table, but I can't clearly remember what year that was, I think it was 1986. My first explorations into programming were on that thing. I must have spent countless of hours with it. An 8086, 640kb of RAM and two floppy drives. Good memories.
They made some beautiful computers. I really want to, eventually, get an M20, or wait until 3D printers get good enough to print one. ;-)
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
I worked for Olivetti’s Advanced Technology Lab in Cupertino CA in the late 80s. They had some innovative PCs back then.
We had an electric Olivetti typewriter at home when I was growing up before we got a word processor/pc
I picked up an Olivetti Lettera 22 last year. It's quite nice; it won a Compasso d'Oro industrial design award.
About 10 years ago I found old mail/letters belonging to my great aunt. One of these lettres did really stand out: just mundane stuff, some insurance invoice, but the font on that letter was a thing of beauty. It took me quite some time but I ended up finding which font was used in that (typerwrited) letter and it was some Olivetti font.
I've got a scan of that letter and reference somewhere and although I don't remember the ref right now, I know I eventually found which font it was here:
https://luc.devroye.org/fonts-96540.html
P.S: I've got great memories of my father smoking cigs while typing on his IBM selectric eletric typewriter.
I'm actually beginning to wonder if I might have learnt to type on an Olivetti as well. That typewriter's been gone over forty years but it may well have been. We did have computers at school (and were barely allowed access), but I taught myself on a typewriter anyway... I had to... My handwriting's awful!
Wow, the MP1 was 30 years ahead of its time. I can see why people pay (or at least ask) kilobucks for them (e.g., https://www.ebay.com/itm/336225919296).
Adriano Olivetti (1960) Mario Tchou (1961)