
Olivetti – Programma 101 (1967) [video] - turrini
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WnItIQSwfSw
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nkkollaw
As an Italian, it's so sad to see how the second PC (and possibly first
commercially-viable PC?) was Italian and it all went downhill from there :-/

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pmarreck
Past performance will not necessarily reflect (and should not dictate) future
returns :)

Also, the Arab world is arguably worse off... Invented much of math, and is
now dominated by ascientific theocracies

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yakitori
> Also, the Arab world is arguably worse off... Invented much of math

This is historically not true. Sure we get terms like "algebra", "algorithm",
etc from the arab world, but the arab world didn't invent these mathematics
ideas/fields. These ideas/fields go back to the mesopotamia and ancient
greece. Also, the mathematical concepts developed throughout china, india, etc
also.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_algebra](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_algebra)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algorithm](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algorithm)

Certainly the arab world made contributions to math but they certainly didn't
invent most of math.

> and is now dominated by ascientific theocracies

Even during the islamic golden age, it was dominated by "ascientific"
theocracies. One doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the other.

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pmarreck
Fair enough!

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antirez
In case you think this is fake revisionism and computer revolution and
Italians don't mix well:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federico_Faggin](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federico_Faggin)

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lou1306
I would say that Redis counts as a counterexample, too :)

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antirez
You too gente :-) Redis is just the incarnation of technology available, so it
does not provide any real added value in perspective, however people like
Faggin are not isolated cases. Italians insist in believing that the creative
force of our country is something lost in the history, but this is not true.
For sure in the latest decades there was a serious issue due to the fact that
school, once very rigid, became a joke now.

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zedr
Do you think the gap was caused by a decline in the quality of education? I'm
convinced the Italian software industry was set back in the Eighties due to
the lack of laws protecting intellectual property. It was more convenient and
risk-free to sell compilations of pirated software on datasettes in newspaper
stands, than set up a software development company.

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pan69
Ah, Olivetti. That brings back memories of the M24 my dad bought through his
work, I think it was in '88\. An 8086 at 8Mhz, 640Kb of RAM (more than enough
:) and CGA color graphics (that's a whopping 4 simultaneous colors).

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zerkten
My Dad had one too, but I don't remember the date. It was probably one of the
first in Northern Ireland at that time based on later discussions with him. I
always gravitate to my Amiga when I visit home, but we still have the M24
knocking around. I wonder if it'll still have the old Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheets
he was working on.

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thomasdd
There is a great movie about the life of Adriano Olivetti.
[http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2450898/](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2450898/)

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riffraff
The businessman having his wife/secretary operate the machine poolside after a
dip might be the best thing I've seen in advertisement ever.

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digi_owl
There is no way any company would dare pull that in the present political
world...

I found it more interesting when the engineer picked up the readied punchcard
and filled in some numbers. I suspect that beyond the storage medium (these
days he would probably open some Excel template file), this is what most
computing is still about today.

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simonebrunozzi
If you are not familiar with Olivetti (the company), or the founder's son
(Adriano), you should.

In a parallel universe, Olivetti is the market leader in chip manufacturing,
and Intel never existed.

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cedivad
In a parallel universe, SV is in Italy. Yeah, sure. Let's keep dreaming,
fellow Italian.

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danso
This reminded me of the scene in "Sopranos", when Paulie visits a Starbucks-
like cafe
[https://youtu.be/cUKJWsnAAXs?t=1m1s](https://youtu.be/cUKJWsnAAXs?t=1m1s)

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agumonkey
going from home use, to stored programs, to multivariate math subroutine in 10
seconds

