The Mysterious Affair at Olivetti: IBM, the CIA, and the Cold War Conspiracy to Shut Down Production of the World's First Desktop Computer
320
The Mysterious Affair at Olivetti: IBM, the CIA, and the Cold War Conspiracy to Shut Down Production of the World's First Desktop Computer
320eBook
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Overview
The human, business, design, engineering, cold war, and tech story of how the Olivetti company came to be, how it survived two world wars and brought a ravaged Italy back to life, how after it mastered the typewriter business with the famous "Olivetti touch," it entered the new, fierce electronics race; how its first desktop compter, the P101, came to be; how, within eighteen months, it had caught up with, and surpassed, IBM, the American giant that by then had become an arm of the American government, developing advanced weapon systems; Olivetti putting its own mainframe computer on the market with its desktop prototype, selling 40,000 units, including to NASA for its lunar landings. How Olivetti made inroads into the US market by taking control of Underwood of Hartford CT as an assembly plant for Olivetti's own typewriters and future miniaturized personal computers; how a week after Olivetti purchased Underwood, the US government filed an antitrust suit to try to stop it; how Adriano Olivetti, the legendary idealist, socialist, visionary, heir to the company founded by his father, built the company into a fantastical dynasty--factories, offices, satellite buildings spread over more than fifty acres--while on a train headed for Switzerland in 1960 for supposed meetings and then to Hartford, never arrived, dying suddenly of a heart attack at fifty-eight . . . how eighteen months later, his brilliant young engineer, who had assembled Olivetti's superb team of electronic engineers, was killed, as well, in a suspicious car crash, and how the Olivetti company and the P101 came to its insidious and shocking end.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780451493668 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group |
| Publication date: | 11/05/2019 |
| Sold by: | Random House |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 320 |
| File size: | 69 MB |
| Note: | This product may take a few minutes to download. |
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Read an Excerpt
Chapter 1
Oranges
Carnival time in Ivrea, Italy, is celebrated each year as in many other parts of the world as a riot of exuberant excess before the sobering arrival of Lent. It is sometimes referred to as a carnival, and at others as the Festival of the Red Caps, and the Battle of the Oranges. Both are relevant because this annual ritual can be traced back for at least a thousand years. Historians believe it began as a fertility rite. Remnants of its ancient past can still be discerned; it ends, as it always has, with the burning of a tree, thought to refer to the ancient idea that if you wanted a bountiful spring, someone, or something, had to pay for it.
The custom of wearing a red cap came about during the French Revolution, in sympathy and solidarity. But when, or why, oranges became part of the proceedings no one really knows. That sunny, succulent fruit is not grown in these parts, which tend to have very cold winters—Ivrea, a town in Piedmont, is picturesquely silhouetted right up against the Alps. But some kind of battle is certainly part of the legend that has been handed down, a fable that insinuated itself into the festival in the nineteenth century and gradually took over. Time moves so slowly in Ivrea that what is measured in decades in most parts of the world is calculated in centuries here. As the story goes, a tyrannical baron in the Middle Ages demanded such a ruinous increase in taxes that his subjects were close to starving. One night the baron, exercising his droit du seigneur, took a miller’s pretty daughter to bed. She was all prepared. At, one assumes, just the right psychological moment, she pulled out a dagger and expertly removed his head. A battle was joined. Soldiers were summoned to punish the citizens of Ivrea, only to be defeated by a handsome general who commanded a superior force. The town was saved and the pretty miller’s daughter destined to be celebrated by generations of grateful citizens who have no future and for whom past glories loom large.
To visit there for a few weeks is to return with vivid impressions: green water bubbling and churning in canal locks, an empty piazza, silent in the noonday sun, shutters banging, a mist on the mountain peaks. A girl in white goes by on a bicycle, silhouetted against black foothills, there are plastic flowers on a window ledge and graffiti on the windows of an abandoned hotel. Old men amble along the river walks by day. At night teenagers smoking cigarettes huddle, chatter, and silently slip away. Ducks gather in freeform patterns against the river banks. Lanterns creek and groan and bats wheel over the chimneys. The whole town is transfixed, as if “a painted ship upon a painted ocean.”
Once a year everything changes. Barricades appear on the many wrought-iron balconies in the main square. Merchants hammer up protective boards for their display windows. Residents begin to string up flags and bunting in the narrow alleys. Deliveries roll in; everywhere boxes are unloaded. The town is stirring, roused from its somnambulism or perhaps ennui. Elaborate floats are repainted. These will carry the groups of baron’s men, who face the usual barrage of oranges that will end in the usual way, however well protected by plenty of padding and some steel helmets. There will be almost a thousand actors, descending from the hillsides and arriving from as far away as Sicily—Sicilians are in particular demand because of their accurate aim—and spectators will also be arriving in their tens of thousands. The supply of ammunition—crates of oranges laid out along the narrow alleys and lined up on the walls of the squares—is practically limitless. By the time the party is over, the cobblestone streets will be ankle deep in orange slush.
When the ceremonies begin the floats start to arrive, with majestic slowness down the alleys, their pace dictated by their teams of horses, resplendent in crimson blankets, ribbons, and flowers, jingling and rumbling. Walls echo with confused shouts, the whinnying and snorting of the horses, running footsteps, the fluting of fifes, crashing of drums and blare of trumpets. The windows thump and splatter with exploding fruit. As for the costumes, these echo the mad logic of ones worn by the Swiss Guards at the Vatican, all stripes and checkerboard patterns in blocks of violent red, purple, orange, blue, and green. There are fifteen teams of men, each wearing its own distinctive uniform, and a few girls as well, along with old-timers who have been battered for decades.
But the stars of the event are, first, the miller’s daughter, or Mugnaia, in an ankle-length white wool dress and matching, ermine-trimmed cape with a long train. She is always accompanied by, second, her General, in all his sartorial splendor: cocked hat, black jacket, sashed, corded, epauletted, and befeathered, accompanied by white tights, black riding boots, and immaculate white gloves. They lend their benign presence to the affair, this charade, this mock victory over tyranny, that sometimes becomes an endurance test. As the hours go by, fighters drop out exhausted, squatting against the cold walls, wiping cheeks streaming with orange juice and sometimes blood. It is a sport, just a game, but every once in a while someone gets hurt. For the most part, an observer said, honor is satisfied if the soldier appears at breakfast next day with a black eye.
The red caps have become an anomaly but are always worn, as a gesture of defiance and also solidarity, conjuring up memories of a similar cap that is another part of the Piedmontese tradition. If a citizen should appear in the streets bareheaded his photograph will be published in the annual souvenir program upside-down. This faux pas is considered a serious vote of no confidence. Ivreans have not forgotten that their town was once prosperous, symbol of all that was innovative and superior in Italian design and manufacture. That was many decades ago, and now they are reduced to performing such battles for the casual delectation of the crowd. Very well; it will have to do. And so any driver who enters the city will, at some time or other, be confronted by the sculpture of a giant hand, something like a papier-mâché construction, brandishing a monstrous orange ball. No explanation is needed. Everybody knows.
The international company that brought renown and prosperity to Ivrea was Olivetti. By no coincidence, Olivetti had supported the annual affair ever since its founder, Camillo, first took part in 1880, his slim, neat figure clad in white velvet with big, puffy sleeves and a marksman’s neat little hat to match. He, owner of a small but profitable electrical engineering company, was something of an artist, always coming up with machines of his own invention, and quickly saw that the quill pen was about to give way to a new machine designed for the modern office. He built a primitive typewriter and then went around the town with a horse and cart, promoting its superior qualities. Quite soon he had sold enough to hire his own salesman and Italy’s very first typewriter company, which by then had gone through several transformations, took off. As the company prospered, so did the annual carnival. In addition to all the paraphernalia required, the festivities included an annual buffet feast for the whole town, dances, and quantities of chocolates, candy, and bunches of mimosa that the Mugnaia throws into the crowd.
An Olivetti bride—Gertrud Kiefer Olivetti, who married Camillo’s son Massimo, was the first postwar Mugnaia, well bundled up against the cold, her way lit by torches because there was, in 1947, no electricity. An Olivetti grandson, Dino’s son David, or Davide Olivetti, became the most strikingly handsome General in living memory, riding, smiling, and saluting on a piebald horse in 1981. Grazia, who married the oldest of Camillo’s three sons, waving and throwing candy to the crowd, became the Mugnaia six years after her marriage to Adriano, in 1956. In due course, so was their daughter Laura, always called Lalla.
Behind the blare and dazzle, the fighting, the cheers, the parades, the pomp and circumstance that followed a town’s yearly assertion of victory over oppression, can be perceived the unobtrusive presence of a certain member of that family in particular, Adriano Olivetti. Along with his siblings (three sisters and two brothers), he grew up on the verdant outskirts of the town, schooled at home for several years, went on to public school and, in college studied engineering. Camillo was persuaded that Adriano was ready to run the company when he was just thirty.
The son built on his father’s accomplishments with even bigger successes of his own. By 1960, the company Camillo had founded with a single primitive typewriter had enlarged to factories, offices, and satellite buildings spread over fifty-four acres. Olivetti sold five kinds of typewriters, several special-purpose adding machines and calculators, teleprinters, and office furniture as well, with plants from Barcelona to Bogotá.
In an even more audacious move Olivetti had pioneered the first all-transistorized mainframe computer in 1959, running neck and neck with the one IBM, with more time and infinite resources, produced that year. Its well-built, well-conceived machines were sold in 117 countries, where it had acquired a reputation, not only for competitiveness but something more taxing: uniqueness. Their salesrooms in New York and Paris in particular reflected an elegance of design that came to be called the Tocco Olivetti, or Olivetti touch. A typical advertisement might “consist only of a few deft strokes from an abstract artist’s pen or an intriguing geometric pattern, with the word Olivetti printed where it can be noticed but does not intrude,” Fortune magazine reported. Or not even that. One of its early posters showed only a rose growing out of an inkwell.
The company’s reach extended to its enlightened social programs. It paid better salaries than other companies. It had a shorter day and often a shorter work week. It provided a library, cinema, recreation center, first aid, a lecture program, lunches, buses, and low-cost apartments. Camillo’s ironclad rule was that no worker should be fired, though he might be reassigned. Worker productivity was enviably high and so was worker loyalty. It was the pride of Ivrea. And, in the fall of 1959 Olivetti had moved into the American market as well. Adriano had bought Underwood, founded in 1874, widely considered the model for the modern typewriter. It was the largest foreign takeover of a U.S. company that ever was. For Adriano it represented the ambition of a lifetime.
People describe Adriano Olivetti as an idealist, a futurist, a visionary, profoundly moral, with an uncanny ability to fulfill his dreams. To many he was considered a legend, surrounded in “an aura of superiority and mystery.” In person he was not prepossessing. Although he had inherited his father’s finely shaped head and even features, by his fifties he had grown perfectly round, what hair he had left was a wispy gray and descending chins did the rest. He often dressed with formality, looking rather like an undertaker, or perhaps on his way to a garden party at Buckingham Palace—all that was missing was a top hat. None of this seemed to matter because of the allure of his personality. Whenever he met a prospective employee, he fixed him with a dazzling regard, not quite a stare, but direct and intense. His right eye turned slightly inward, as if looking at life both outwardly and inwardly. It was odd, unsettling, yet curiously endearing.
Everyone talked about The Look. People were captivated, almost hypnotized, without knowing why. And when, instead of qualifications, bottom lines, and profit margins, Adriano talked about his dream of a better society and the virtues of community, the listener would be caught up in an idealistic fervor. One applicant said, “He hired me and I had no idea what I was supposed to do. It didn’t seem important.”
As a rule Adriano took an active part in the three-day carnival, culminating in the Battle of Oranges, which took place on a Saturday. This particular Saturday, February 27, 1960, dawned clear and cold with not much of a wind: perfect fight weather. But Adriano could not be there for the party. He was being driven to Milan by his faithful chauffeur, Luigi Perotti, to attend an important meeting and then a lunch, followed by a weekend in Switzerland. He was making final plans for the new Olivetti-Underwood stock offering that would be offered on the Milan stock exchange the following Monday. The future plans for Underwood obsessed him. He was leaving in a week’s time to inspect his prize, which would be turned into an assembly plant for Olivetti’s new computers, then shipped all over the world. As usual, he had visited his favorite spa in Ischia the month before and was full of energy and well-being, his brother Dino remarked. He was fifty-eight years old.
Franco Ferrarotti, professor, sociologist, author, politician, and an old comrade, said that he, in Rome, received a long-distance call from Adriano later that afternoon. The latter was just about to board the Milan–Lausanne express.
“I was the last person to talk to him,” Ferrarotti said. “He said to me, ‘Franco, how are you? I’m fine. I am in a hurry. I am going to Switzerland for the weekend. Be ready to leave for Hartford, Connecticut, on Monday, March 7.” The astonished Ferrarotti wanted to know why. “Because we now have complete control of Underwood,” Adriano said triumphantly. “Underwood has eighteen product lines. We will keep only three. We will use their line of distribution, which is superb. We will get the ten best engineers from Ivrea and take them to Hartford. I want you to come with us. Be ready!”
That fateful day Posy, wife of Adriano’s youngest brother, Dino, saw him. “I was just walking along the street near the Hotel Principe in Milan and along came Adriano’s car with Perotti driving. Perotti was honking and Adriano was waving out of the window, all smiles. I have never seen him so happy.”
Ferrarotti was not, as he thought, the last person to talk to Adriano before he left on his last journey. Someone went with him to the station. He was Ottorino Beltrami, called the “Comandante,” a former submarine commander who had been part of top management at Olivetti for a decade. Just why the Comandante should have been seeing Olivetti off that day is not known. What is known is that Adriano Olivetti took a seat in the back of the second-class section instead of first class, as might have been expected. We know that his mood of triumph and optimism had changed. He sat down in an empty compartment. Shortly afterward a youth (identity unknown) pulled back the compartment door and took a seat opposite him.
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