An Olivetti PC was an ultimate dream to have in the late 80s and the early 90s for me, in impressionable age of adolescence, prone to the call of tinkering, hacking and programming. They were the brand, at least in Europe.
I worked in IT support and engineering for a UK Olivetti dealer / distributor in the 1980s/90s. As such I had access to all sorts of Olivetti kit in various states of functionality. At one time, my home PC was an Olivetti M280 case with an M380 (386DX) motherboard and EGA display adapter. It had a colour monitor and the ANK 27-102 keyboard - it was a 'top end' hybrid for its time that I'd put together from several non-working machines..
I also had a 'faulty' Olivetti inkjet printer that was written off under warranty with a mysterious fault. I eventually managed to fix it by bending the metal paper detector arm so that it slotted properly into the optical sensor - it was a little out of whack and the sensor sometimes couldn't work out whether there was paper in the tray.
Olivetti is famous for having bought Acorn, and owning the ARM architecture.
They likely think about that missed opportunity deeply in their corporate culture.
I don't know the story of how they let that get away.
"Such was the secrecy surrounding the ARM CPU project that when Olivetti were negotiating to take a controlling share of Acorn in 1985, they were not told about the development team until after the negotiations had been finalised...
"Olivetti would eventually relinquish majority control of Acorn in early 1996, selling shares to US and UK investment groups to leave the company with a shareholding in Acorn of around 45%."
Our school had an Olivetti PC (286), which was memorable for two reasons: it was faster than my own 286 (surprising because I thought they were running at the same clock speed), and it was the only one. Indeed, it was the only Olivetti PC I'd seen anywhere.
My mom had an Olivetti Quaderno notebook. Just seeing the image brought so many memories. I was about 10 years. The buttons, the strange small display, bevels, ripples around the power button... Thank you for the article!
The M24 was the first computer my family purchased. My dad worked for a bank and in the mid eighties they were modernising that bank and offered employees an option to buy a PC. Since contract went to Olivetti, we got the M24. I remember the evening we picked it up and installed it on the living room table, but I can't clearly remember what year that was, I think it was 1986. My first explorations into programming were on that thing. I must have spent countless of hours with it. An 8086, 640kb of RAM and two floppy drives. Good memories.
My grandmother had a green/blue-ish Olivetti mechanical printing calculator, I have fond memories of trying to figure out how it worked by randomly trying buttons (while being used to electronic calculators)
About 10 years ago I found old mail/letters belonging to my great aunt. One of these lettres did really stand out: just mundane stuff, some insurance invoice, but the font on that letter was a thing of beauty. It took me quite some time but I ended up finding which font was used in that (typerwrited) letter and it was some Olivetti font.
I've got a scan of that letter and reference somewhere and although I don't remember the ref right now, I know I eventually found which font it was here:
Such a nice memory :)
I also had a 'faulty' Olivetti inkjet printer that was written off under warranty with a mysterious fault. I eventually managed to fix it by bending the metal paper detector arm so that it slotted properly into the optical sensor - it was a little out of whack and the sensor sometimes couldn't work out whether there was paper in the tray.
They likely think about that missed opportunity deeply in their corporate culture.
I don't know the story of how they let that get away.
"Such was the secrecy surrounding the ARM CPU project that when Olivetti were negotiating to take a controlling share of Acorn in 1985, they were not told about the development team until after the negotiations had been finalised...
"Olivetti would eventually relinquish majority control of Acorn in early 1996, selling shares to US and UK investment groups to leave the company with a shareholding in Acorn of around 45%."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acorn_Computers
I've got a scan of that letter and reference somewhere and although I don't remember the ref right now, I know I eventually found which font it was here:
https://luc.devroye.org/fonts-96540.html
P.S: I've got great memories of my father smoking cigs while typing on his IBM selectric eletric typewriter.