
Olivetti Programma 101 “Perottina” - bootload
http://www.curtamania.com/curta/database/brand/olivetti/Olivetti%20Programma%20101/index.html
======
Animats
I used one of those as an undergrad. It was really a programmable calculator.
It was incredibly slow for an all-electronic device; square roots took
seconds. You could write simple programs for it and get homework done, though.

It was beautiful. Olivetti had great industrial design in the 1960s and 1970s.
Their typewriters and calculators were works of art, and you can often find
them today in the collections of major modern art museums. Olivetti tried to
get into computers, and even had a good-looking IBM PC clone. The nice design
didn't help.

The Mathatron came out a year earlier, in 1963.
([http://www.oldcalculatormuseum.com/math8-48mII.html](http://www.oldcalculatormuseum.com/math8-48mII.html))
Unlike the Programma 101, the Mathatron had trig functions built-in. The
Mathatron had enough compute power that they offered a remote-access shared
programmable calculator with a phone modem. ([http://www.amazon.com/Wright-
Mathatron-Computer-Calculator-M...](http://www.amazon.com/Wright-Mathatron-
Computer-Calculator-Memorabilia/dp/B0086U6EFG))

The shared-calculator approach reached its peak with the Control Data Remote
Calculator.
([http://www.oldcalculatormuseum.com/a-cdc-11-65.html](http://www.oldcalculatormuseum.com/a-cdc-11-65.html))
This was a scheme to have 2000 calculators share a CDC 6600 mainframe
computer, an excellent supercomputer of the 1960s. It was not successful, and
surplus units appeared in the movies Soylent Green, Westworld, and Marooned.

None of these were very powerful, but the alternative at the time was slide
rules and trig tables.

~~~
Someone
_" It was incredibly slow for an all-electronic device"_

It wasn't all-electronic; that memory used _sound_waves_ to store bits. That
six meters of wire probably meant that reading a word, worst-case, took about
a ms (assuming a fairly generous sound speed of 6km/s), and about every
instruction read from and wrote to that storage. This being the first of its
kind, the implementation probably would be worst-case for both reading and
writing (wait for the 'start of memory' marker, count bits until the ones
needed come along)

And of course, it had to read its instructions from the same wire. I guess 500
instructions per second would be an exaggeration of its performance.

~~~
Someone
I started wondering how one would reliably store a bit in about a microsecond
of audio in the 1960s in a device that doesn't require continuous tuning.

Google led me to
[http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delay_line_memory#Magnetostri...](http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delay_line_memory#Magnetostrictive_delay_lines).
It isn't audio, but a torsional wave, and Wikipedia claims a delay in the
order of half a millisecond.

------
snoopybbt
The story of Olivetti is another sad story of great business created by
visionary people like Adriano Olivetti, and destroyed by the same old ignorant
people that run the country.

When Olivetti was in financial troubles, a task force of government people and
people from other industries (FIAT, cited in the video at
"[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oYB2oBc1BpA"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oYB2oBc1BpA"),
linked in another post) gathered together not to help Olivetti, but just to
sell it.

They just did not understand what they were dealing with.

~~~
iwwr
Are you aware of a documentary in the English language on Olivetti?

------
pan69
There is a great documentary on this. Unfortunately Youtube only has the
Italian version (not that there is anything wrong with Italian). I have seen
it in English (narration and subtitles, so it's out there, somewhere).

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oYB2oBc1BpA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oYB2oBc1BpA)

------
ExpiredLink
I learned programming on one of those. It had a magnetic card to store your
programs. You could connect it to an electric Olivetti typewriter. Imagine
that, a real affordable printer back then!

------
SiVal
The Olivetti-Underwood Programma 101 was the first computer I ever programmed
before graduating to the "big iron" of Fortran on punchcards fed into a
mainframe.

There is a Programma 101 on display at the Computer History Museum a couple of
blocks from the Googleplex. I was walking along a glass display cabinet with
my kids, saying, "I used that one, and I owned that one, and that one...,"
when there it was in all its ancient glory.

------
tonyedgecombe
We had one of these at school, I don't remember much apart from the fact the
teacher didn't have a clue what to do with it. It was about the same time I
got a TI programmable calculator which was my real introduction to
programming.

------
bootload
stumbled on this reading <[https://www.hackerschool.com/blog/67-announcing-
eight-new-re...](https://www.hackerschool.com/blog/67-announcing-eight-new-
residents-for-2015>) and discovered this machine was 'first programming
project' for 'Robert Lefkowitz' (r0ml)

