The Mysterious Affair at Olivetti

The never-before-told true account of the design and development of the first desktop computer by the world's most famous high-styled typewriter company, more than a decade before the arrival of the Osborne 1, the Apple 1, the first Intel microprocessor, and IBM's PC5150. The human, business, design, engineering, cold war, and tech story of how the Olivetti company came to be, how it survived two world wars and brought a ravaged Italy back to life, how after it mastered the typewriter business with the famous "Olivetti touch," it entered the new, fierce electronics race; how its first desktop compter, the P101, came to be; how, within eighteen months, it had caught up with, and surpassed, IBM, the American giant that by then had become an arm of the American government, developing advanced weapon systems; Olivetti putting its own mainframe computer on the market with its desktop prototype, selling 40,000 units, including to NASA for its lunar landings. How Olivetti made inroads into the US market by taking control of Underwood of Hartford CT as an assembly plant for Olivetti's own typewriters and future miniaturized personal computers; how a week after Olivetti purchased Underwood, the US government filed an antitrust suit to try to stop it; how Adriano Olivetti, the legendary idealist, socialist, visionary, heir to the company founded by his father, built the company into a fantastical dynasty--factories, offices, satellite buildings spread over more than fifty acres--while on a train headed for Switzerland in 1960 for supposed meetings and then to Hartford, never arrived, dying suddenly of a heart attack at fifty-eight . . . how eighteen months later, his brilliant young engineer, who had assembled Olivetti's superb team of electronic engineers, was killed, as well, in a suspicious car crash, and how the Olivetti company and the P101 came to its insidious and shocking end.

"Tantalizing ... colorful ... Secrest marshals an impressive array of circumstantial evidence encompassing the shadowy web of business, politics, and espionage that ensnared postwar Italy."

--The New Yorker

"The first English-language history of the legendary Italian firm and a gripping account of its little-known race to develop the world's first dekstop computer ... Secrest is an engaging guide ... Riveting."

--Julian Lucas, Harper's

"Meryle Secrest is a master biographer ... a Cold War mystery replete with industrial history and espionage, international intrigue, early death, and the creation of the world's first desktop computer ... surprisingly relevant to the conversation we are having today about the nature of electronic machines and industrial development, art, and design ... a vital piece of almost lost industrial and engineering history."

--Porchlight "Books to Watch"

"A little-known slice of computer history in [Secrest's] fascinating account of the Italian typewriter company Olivetti, which created the first desktop computer ... a riveting look at an ambitious and inventive family deserving wider attention."

--Publishers Weekly

Autorentext
MERYLE SECREST was born and educated in Bath, England, and lives in Washington, DC. She is the author of twelve biographies and was awarded the 2006 Presidential National Humanities Medal.

Leseprobe
Chapter 1

Oranges

Carnival time in Ivrea, Italy, is celebrated each year as in many other parts of the world as a riot of exuberant excess before the sobering arrival of Lent. It is sometimes referred to as a carnival, and at others as the Festival of the Red Caps, and the Battle of the Oranges. Both are relevant because this annual ritual can be traced back for at least a thousand years. Historians believe it began as a fertility rite. Remnants of its ancient past can still be discerned; it ends, as it always has, with the burning of a tree, thought to refer to the ancient idea that if you wanted a bountiful spring, someone, or something, had to pay for it.

The custom of wearing a red cap came about during the French Revolution, in sympathy and solidarity. But when, or why, oranges became part of the proceedings no one really knows. That sunny, succulent fruit is not grown in these parts, which tend to have very cold winters—Ivrea, a town in Piedmont, is picturesquely silhouetted right up against the Alps. But some kind of battle is certainly part of the legend that has been handed down, a fable that insinuated itself into the festival in the nineteenth century and gradually took over. Time moves so slowly in Ivrea that what is measured in decades in most parts of the world is calculated in centuries here. As the story goes, a tyrannical baron in the Middle Ages demanded such a ruinous increase in taxes that his subjects were close to starving. One night the baron, exercising his droit du seigneur, took a miller’s pretty daughter to bed. She was all prepared. At, one assumes, just the right psychological moment, she pulled out a dagger and expertly removed his head. A battle was joined. Soldiers were summoned to punish the citizens of Ivrea, only to be defeated by a handsome general who commanded a superior force. The town was saved and the pretty miller’s daughter destined to be celebrated by generations of grateful citizens who have no future and for whom past glories loom large.

To visit there for a few weeks is to return with vivid impressions: green water bubbling and churning in canal locks, an empty piazza, silent in the noonday sun, shutters banging, a mist on the mountain peaks. A girl in white goes by on a bicycle, silhouetted against black foothills, there are plastic flowers on a window ledge and graffiti on the windows of an abandoned hotel. Old men amble along the river walks by day. At night teenagers smoking cigarettes huddle, chatter, and silently slip away. Ducks gather in freeform patterns against the river banks. Lanterns creek and groan and bats wheel over the chimneys. The whole town is transfixed, as if “a painted ship upon a painted ocean.”

Once a year everything changes. Barricades appear on the many wrought-iron balconies in the main square. Merchants hammer up protective boards for their display windows. Residents begin to string up flags and bunting in the narrow alleys. Deliveries roll in; everywhere boxes are unloaded. The town is stirring, roused from its somnambulism or perhaps ennui. Elaborate floats are repainted. These will carry the groups of baron’s men, who face the usual barrage of oranges that will end in the usual way, however well protected by plenty of padding and some steel helmets. There will be almost a thousand actors, descending from the hillsides and arriving from as far away as Sicily—Sicilians are in particular demand because of their accurate aim—and spectators will also be arriving in their tens of thousands. The supply of ammunition—crates of oranges laid out along the narrow alleys and lined up on the walls of the squares—is practically limitless. By the time the party is over, the cobblestone streets will be ankle deep in orange slush.

When the ceremonies begin the floats start to arrive, with majestic slowness down the alleys, their pace dictated by their teams of horses, resplendent in crimson blankets, ribbons, and flowers, jingling and rumbling. Walls echo with confused shouts, the whinnying and snorting of the horses, running footsteps, the fluting of fifes, crashing of drums and blare of trumpets. The windows thump and splatter with exploding fruit. As for the costumes, these echo the mad logic of ones worn by the Swiss Guards at the Vatican, all stripes and checkerboard patterns in blocks of violent red, purple, orange, blue, and green. There are fifteen teams of men, each wearing its own distinctive uniform, and a few girls as well, along with old-timers who have been battered for decades.

But the stars of the event are, first, the mille…