if you Olivetti Program 101, You probably wouldn’t even know it was a computer; with its 36 keys and paper tape printer, it might look like a very nice-looking large adding machine. But such quality is to be expected, as Olivetti is best known for its typewriters, a smash hit that now occupies a prominent place in museums of 20th-century design. One product that is less well known, at least outside its native Italy, is the computer; a product line that began with mainframes in the mid-1950s, ended with IBM PC clones in the 1990s, and culminated in innovation with the Programma 101 in 1965.
Programma 101 is also known as P101 or Perottina, named after its inventor, the engineer. Pierre Georges Perrot“I dreamed of a friendly machine that could do all the menial, error-prone tasks for me,” he later said. “A machine that could learn quietly and perform its tasks, store simple data and instructions, that anyone could use, that was cheap, and the same size as the other office products people used.”
Realizing that vision required not only technical effort but also aesthetic flair: the task was entrusted to Mario Bellini, a young architect and industrial designer who had worked as a consultant for Olivetti following his colleague (and future founder of the Memphis Group) Ettore Sottsass.
All this work took place at a critical time for the company, following the death of its president, Adriano Olivetti, in 1960. Written by Opinionated DesignerThe company “ran into serious financial difficulties after acquiring the American giant Underwood, and sold its electronics division to General Electric in early 1965.” Olivetti’s son Roberto “had approved the development of a small ‘desktop’ computer in 1962.” “To avoid the project being swallowed up by GE, Perotto’s team changed some of the 101’s specifications to make it look like a ‘calculating machine’ rather than a ‘computer,’ so that the project could remain with Olivetti.” But on a technical level, the Perrottina was still just that: a computer.
In addition to subtraction, multiplication and division, “it can also perform logical operations, conditional and unconditional jumps, and print data stored in registers, using a custom-made alphanumeric programming language.” Riccardo Bianchini writes in Inexhibit. in Video aboveIn 2013, enthusiast Vladimir Zaniewski demonstrated its capabilities with a simple alphanumeric Lunar Lander game. This is a historically relevant project, as NASA purchased 10 Lunar Landers for use in the Apollo 11 moon landing mission. But more importantly, it was a result of a relatively down-to-earth device, in Bianchini’s words, “a non-intimidating object that anyone could use in their own home.” In that sense, there’s no doubt that the Olivetti Program 101 was indeed the first personal computer in history.
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Based in Seoul, Colin MaOnershall Writing and broadcastingHe has written papers on cities, languages, and cultures, and his projects include the Substack newsletter. Books about cities And books A city without a state: Walking through 21st-century Los Angeles. Follow us on Twitter CollinhamOnershall or Facebook.
