If you were to come across an Olivetti Programma 101, you probably wouldn’t recognize it as a computer. With its 36 keys and its paper-strip printer, it might strike you as some kind of oversized adding machine, albeit an unusually handsome one. But then, you’d expect that quality from Olivetti, a company best remembered for its enormously successful typewriters that now occupy prime space in museums of twentieth-century design. Among its lesser-known products, at least outside its native Italy, are its computers, a line that began with mainframes in the mid-nineteen-fifties and ended with IBM PC clones in the nineties, reaching the height of its innovation with the Programma 101 in 1965.

The Programma 101 is also known as the P101 or the Perottina, a name derived from that of its inventor, engineer Pier Giorgio Perotto. “I dreamed of a friendly machine to which you could delegate all those menial tasks which are prone to errors,” he later said, “a machine that could quietly learn and perform tasks, that could store simple data and instructions, that could be used by anyone, that would be inexpensive and the size of other office products which people used.”

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

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