History

Camillo Olivetti founded Olivetti in 1908 as Italy first typewriter manufacturer in a converted former cotton mill in Ivrea. His son Adriano, who took control of the company in 1938, had studied at Fiat and in the United States and had become convinced that industrial capitalism could serve human flourishing rather than merely profit. He began commissioning Italy finest architects to rebuild the entire company environment.

Between the 1930s and 1960s Adriano Olivetti hired Giovanni Michelucci, Ignazio Gardella, Luigi Figini, Gino Pollini, Marco Zanuso, and others to design factory buildings that were in themselves expressions of beauty and dignity, not just production sheds. Around the factories he built workers housing, nurseries open to all employees children, a community library, canteens designed as social spaces, theatres, sports facilities, and a research centre. The architectural quality of each commission was extraordinarily high; the factory buildings from Figini and Pollini in particular are among the finest examples of Italian modernism.

Adriano Olivetti also ran the company as an experiment in social democracy: workers participated in governance, profit-sharing was introduced, and the seven-hour working day was pioneered here before becoming Italian law. He died suddenly in 1960 at age 58, and without his guiding vision the company lost coherence and market position in the transition to computing, eventually selling its computing division to General Electric in 1964. Production of typewriters continued until the early 2000s before the final closure.

The Programma 101, launched at the New York World Fair in 1965, is regarded by historians as a landmark in computing: a desk-sized programmable calculating machine with magnetic card memory, it predated the Altair and Apple by more than a decade and sold approximately 44,000 units. HP licensed its technology for its own early desktop calculators.