Founding
The company was founded as "Ing. C. Olivetti & C., S.p.A."[10] by Camillo Olivetti in 1908 in the Turin commune of Ivrea, Italy. Olivetti was initially a typewriter manufacturer.[11] The firm was mainly developed by his son Adriano Olivetti.[12][13]
Olivetti opened its first overseas manufacturing plant in 1930, and its Divisumma electric calculator was launched in 1948. It inspired Thomas J. Watson Jr. to change IBM's approach to industrial design beginning in the 1950s.[14] In 1959, Olivetti produced Italy's first electronic computer, the transistorised Elea 9003, and bought the Underwood Typewriter Company. It sold its electronics division to General Electric as required by banks for new loans.[15] But it continued to develop new computing products, including Programma 101, one of the first commercially produced programmable calculators.[16][17][18] In the 1970s and 1980s, Olivetti was the biggest manufacturer of office machines in Europe and 2nd biggest PC vendor in Europe after IBM.
In 1980, Olivetti began distributing in Indonesia through Dragon Computer & Communication.
In 1981, Olivetti installed the electronic voting systems for the European Parliament in Strasburg and Luxembourg.[19]
In 1986, the company acquired Triumph-Adler, a major office equipment manufacturer based in Germany that also produced typewriters, from Litton Industries of the United States.[20][21] With this acquisition, Olivetti grabbed 50 percent of the European typewriter market.[22]
In September 1994, the company launched Olivetti Telemedia chaired by Elserino Piol.[23]
Since 2003, Olivetti has been part of the Telecom Italia Group through a merger.[24]
Design
"[A] preoccupation with design developed into a comprehensive corporate philosophy, which embraced everything from the shape of a space bar to the color scheme for an advertising poster."
Olivetti became famous for the meticulous attention it paid to the design of its products, through collaborations with notable architects and designers, over a nearly 60-year period starting in the late 1930s.[12] An early example is the portable 1932 Olivetti MP1 (Modello Portatile in Italian).
From the 1940s to the 1960s, Olivetti industrial design was led by Marcello Nizzoli, who was responsible for the Lexicon 80 and the portable Lettera 22 typewriters, which were released in 1948 and 1950 respectively.[27] The architect and designer Ettore Sottsass began consulting for Olivetti in the late 1950s and designed a series of products including the Tekne 3 typewriter in 1958, the Elea 9003 computer in 1959, and later, the Praxis 48 typewriter in 1964 and the Valentine portable typewriter in 1969.[28][29]
Typewriters
Olivetti began with mechanical typewriters when the company was founded in 1909, and produced them until the mid-1990s. Until the mid-1960s, they were fully mechanical, and models such as the portable Olivetti Valentine were designed by Ettore Sottsass.
With the Tekne/Editor series and Praxis 48, some of the first electromechanical typewriters were introduced. The Editor series was used for speed typing championship competition. The Editor 5 from 1969 was the top model of that series, with proportional spacing and the ability to support justified text borders. In 1972 the electromechanical typeball machines of the Lexicon 90 to 94C series were introduced, as competitors to the IBM Selectric typewriters, the top model 94c supported proportional spacing and justified text borders like the Editor 5, as well as lift-off correction.
In 1978 Olivetti was one of the first manufacturers to introduce electronic daisywheel printer-based word processing machines, called TES 401 and TES 501. Later the ET series typewriters without (or with) LCD and different levels of text editing capabilities were popular in offices. Models in that line were ET 121, ET 201, ET 221, ET 225, ET 231, ET 351, ET 109, ET 110, ET 111, ET 112, ET 115, ET 116, ET 2000, ET 2100, ET 2200, ET 2250, ET 2300, Et 2400 and ET 2500. For home users in 1982 the Praxis 35, Praxis 40 and 45D were some of the first portable electronic typewriters. Later, Olivetti added the Praxis 20, ET Compact 50, ET Compact 60, ET Compact 70, ET Compact 65/66, the ET Personal series and Linea 101. The top models were 8 lines LCD based portables like Top 100 and Studio 801, with the possibility to save the text to a 3.5-inch floppy disk.
The professional line was upgraded with the ETV series video typewriters based on CP/M operating system, ETV 240, ETV 250, ETV 300, ETV 350 and later MS-DOS operating system based ETV 260, ETV 500, ETV 2700, ETV 2900, ETV 4000s word processing systems having floppy drives or
Computers
Between 1955 and 1964 Olivetti developed some of the first transistorized mainframe computer systems, such as the Elea 9003. Although 40 large commercial 9003 and over 100 smaller 6001 scientific machines were completed and leased to customers to 1964, low sales, loss of two key managers and financial instability caused Olivetti to withdraw from the field in 1964.
In 1965 Olivetti released the Programma 101, considered one of the first commercial desktop programmable calculators.[47] It was saved from the sale of the computer division to GE thanks to an employee, Gastone Garziera, who spent successive nights changing the internal categorization of the product from "computer" to "calculator", so leaving the small team in Olivetti and creating some awkward situations in the office, since that space was now owned by GE.[48] In 1974 the firm released the TC800, an intelligent terminal designed to be attached to a mainframe and used in the finance sector. It was followed in 1977 by the TC1800.
During the 1970s Olivetti also manufactured and sold two ranges of minicomputers. The 'A' series started with the typewriter-sized A4 through to the large A8, and the desk-sized DE500 and DE700 series.
Olivetti's first modern personal computer, the M20, featuring a Zilog Z8000 CPU, was released in 1982.
