[HN Gopher] The Olivetti Company
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The Olivetti Company
Author : rbanffy
Score : 101 points
Date : 2026-01-11 15:33 UTC (6 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.abortretry.fail)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.abortretry.fail)
| N19PEDL2 wrote:
| Very interesting article. I still have a working Olivetti M24 at
| home that I occasionally turn on just for the sake of nostalgia.
| rbanffy wrote:
| They made some beautiful computers. I really want to,
| eventually, get an M20, or wait until 3D printers get good
| enough to print one. ;-)
| pan69 wrote:
| 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.
| esafak wrote:
| 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.
| pmdr wrote:
| 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).
| nineteen999 wrote:
| My dad would often bring home an Olivetti M21 "portable" (quotes
| deliberate - that thing weighed a lot). Really gorgeous design
| for its time though.
| mbil wrote:
| The namesake for this emacs minor mode for writing:
| https://github.com/rnkn/olivetti
| nephihaha wrote:
| We had an electric Olivetti typewriter at home when I was growing
| up before we got a word processor/pc
| TacticalCoder wrote:
| 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.
| abcd_f wrote:
| Daaamn... Olivetti. ,d88b.d88b, 88888888888
| `Y8888888Y' `Y888Y' `Y'
|
| An Olivetti PC was an ultimate dream to have in the late 80s and
| the early 90s for me, in impressionable age of adolescence, prone
| to the call of tinkering, hacking and programming. They were
| _the_ brand, at least in Europe.
|
| Such a nice memory :)
| linker3000 wrote:
| 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.
| radomir_cernoch wrote:
| 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!
| chasil wrote:
| 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%."
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acorn_Computers
| bonzini wrote:
| Unfortunately they don't have anymore a corporate culture worth
| speaking of... These days all you see their brand on is cash
| registers.
| code51 wrote:
| Adriano Olivetti (1960) Mario Tchou (1961)
| rm30 wrote:
| 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.)
| yawniek wrote:
| 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.
| BirAdam wrote:
| 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.
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