How Italy Beat America to the Personal Computer, and Lost It

In 1954, Olivetti bolted a typewriter to a sidewalk on Fifth Avenue and hung a twenty-three-meter sculpture on the wall behind it. This is how an Italian company that treated the way an object looks and the way a worker lives as the same problem. The most decorated design company of the twentieth century, which built one of the world's first transistorized computers and arguably the first desktop computer years before Silicon Valley, then let the future slip through its hands. From Camillo Olivetti's first typewriter in 1908, to Adriano Olivetti's radical experiment in humane industry at Ivrea, to the designers who made the machines icons, Nizzoli, Pintori, Sottsass, Bellini, and the Programma 101 that anticipated the personal computer by a decade. A company that taught IBM how a machine should look, and whose long decline ended inside a telephone company. Ways to support our channel: Patreon:   / designdocs   Bookshop: https://bookshop.org/shop/DesignDocs Other things: Instagram: @bctld Portfolio: SingleSpeed.us