Olivetti

History

Founding

Design

Olivetti was famous for the attention it gave to design:

[A] preoccupation with design developed into a comprehensive corporate philosophy, which embraced everything from the shape of a space bar to the color scheme for an advertising poster.

— Jonathan Martin, International Directory of Company Histories

In 1952, the Museum of Modern Art held an exhibit titled "Olivetti: Design in Industry"; today, many Olivetti products are still part of the museum's permanent collection. Another major show, mounted by the Musée des Arts Decoratifs in Paris in 1969, toured five other cities. Olivetti was also renowned for the caliber of the architects it engaged to design its factories and offices, including Le Corbusier, Louis Kahn, Gae Aulenti, Egon Eiermann, Figini-Pollini, Ignazio Gardella, Carlo Scarpe, BBPR, and many others.

Olivetti paid attention to more than product design; graphic and architectural design was also considered pivotal to the company. Giovanni Pintori was hired by Adriano Olivetti in 1936 to work in the publicity department. Pintori was the creator of the Olivetti logo and many promotional posters used to advertise the company and its products. During his activity as Art Director from 1950, Olivetti's graphic design obtained several international awards, and he designed works that created the Olivetti image and became emblematic Italian reference in the history of 20th-century design.

Those designers also created the Olivetti Synthesis office furniture series which mainly were used to be installed in the firm's own headquarters, worldwide branch offices and showrooms. Olivetti also produced some industrial production machinery, including metalworking machines of the Horizon series.

Typewriters

Olivetti began with mechanical typewriters when the company was founded in 1909, and produced them until the mid-1990s. Until the mid-1960s, they were fully mechanical, and models such as the portable Olivetti Valentine were designed by Ettore Sottsass.

With the Tekne/Editor series and Praxis 48, some of the first electromechanical typewriters were introduced. The Editor series was used for speed typing championship competition. The Editor 5 from 1969 was the top model of that series, with proportional spacing and the ability to support justified text borders. In 1972 the electromechanical typeball machines of the Lexicon 90 to 94C series were introduced, as competitors to the IBM Selectric typewriters, the top model 94c supported proportional spacing and justified text borders like the Editor 5, as well as lift-off correction.

Most of the ET/ETV/Praxis series electronic typewriters were designed by Marion Bellini.

By 1994, Olivetti stopped production of typewriters, as most users had transitioned to Personal Computers.

Computers

Between 1955 and 1964 Olivetti developed some of the first transistorized mainframe computer systems, such as the Elea 9003. Although 40 large commercial 9003 and over 100 smaller 6001 scientific machines were completed and leased to customers to 1964, low sales, loss of two key managers and financial instability caused Olivetti to withdraw from the field in 1964.

In 1965 Olivetti released the Programma 101, considered one of the first commercial desktop programmable calculators. It was saved from the sale of the computer division to GE thanks to an employee, Gastone Garziera, who spent successive nights changing the internal categorization of the product from "computer" to "calculator", so leaving the small team in Olivetti and creating some awkward situations in the office, since that space was now owned by GE. In 1974 the firm released the TC800, an intelligent terminal designed to be attached to a mainframe and used in the finance sector. It was followed in 1977 by the TC1800.

In 1990, Olivetti had its own distribution network in New Zealand through Essentially Software Ltd. (owned by Gary McNabb) located at Mt. Eden in Auckland and Wellington, where an Olivetti M300-100 16 MHz PCs with 80386SX CPU were sold for NZ$7395 and used as graphical work station for design houses using Corel Draw as graphical program. The New Zealand distribution stopped in 1991 when Olivetti could not supply their PCs.

Olivetti also sold quasi-portable 8086/8088-based PCs with an integrated keyboard and one or two integrated 3.5" floppy disk drives, running DOS 3.27, an Olivetti OEM version of PC DOS 3.20 with minor improvements like the M21 portable (based on M24) and the M15. Also later Olivetti produced interesting laptops like M111, M211, S20, D33, Philos and Echos series. A very interesting subnotebook was the Olivetti Quaderno, about the same size as an A5 paper – it was the grandfather of the netbooks introduced 20 years later.

End of computer production

Olivetti did attempt to recover its position by introducing the Envision in 1995,^[21] a full multimedia PC, to be used in the living room; this project was a failure. Packard Bell managed to successfully introduce a similar product in the U.S. but only some years later. The main problem of the company was its inability to conjugate innovation with the quality standards it had committed itself to, at a time when the margins on the PC market were diminishing as not only the market but also the number of PC clone producers grew. The company continued to develop personal computers until it sold its PC business in 1997.

End of Olivetti as a separate company

In the 1990s, Olivetti's computer businesses were in great difficulty, reportedly because of the competition from US vendors and new cheap manufacturers for PC components in Taiwan like ASUS, MSI, Gigabyte and so on from which local system builders profited much to offer cheaper PCs than Olivetti did with their own designs. It was on the brink of collapse and had needed government support to stay afloat. A company in transition, it had moved out of the typewriter business into personal computers before embracing telecoms between 1997 and 1999. In the process it had lost around three-quarters of its staff.

In 1999, The Luxembourg-based company Bell S.A. acquired a controlling stake in Olivetti, but sold it to a consortium including the Piralli and Benetton groups two years later. Olivetti then launched a hostile bid for Telecom Italia in February 1999, despite being less than a seventh of the size of its target. In a take-over battle against Deutsche Telekom, and other potential bidders, Olivetti won out and controlled 52.12% of former monopoly Telecom Italia, Italy's #1 fixed-line and mobile phone operator. However, the ownership structure of the merged Olivetti / Telecom Italia was complex and multi-layered with Olivetti took on around $16 billion of extra debt. It was then referred to as the "Olivetti/Telecom Italia affair" because of the unpleasant secret affairs behind.

After a 2003 reorganization, Olivetti became the office equipment and systems services subsidiary of Telecom Italia. In 2003 Olivetti was absorbed into the Telecom Italia group, maintaining a separate identity as Olivetti Tecnost.

Rebirth and resumption of computer production

In 2005, Telecom Italia relaunched the company in the information technology sector, investing €200 million; at first, restoring the original Olivetti brand, then replacing it with Olivetti Tecnost in 2003. In 2007, Olivetti launched the "LINEA_OFFICE", designed by Jasper Morrison for Olivetti; a new line of PCs, notebooks, printers, fax machines and calculators. Olivetti today operates in Italy and Switzerland, and has sales associates in 83 countries. Research and development are located in Agliè, Carsoli and Scarmagno in Italy, and Yverdon, Switzerland.

In March 2011 Olivetti began producing the OliPad, its first tablet computer, featuring a ten-inch screen, 3G, WiFi, Bluetooth connectivity, Nvidia Tegra 2, Android 2.2.2 and a 1024 x 600 display. It also features an application store, with apps specifically designed by Olivetti for 'business & government'. In 2014 the R&D department in Arnad was sold to SICPA.

Olivetti logo history

Among those who responded to the call were the painter Schawinski, the industrial designers Persico and and Nizzoli, the architects Figini and Pollini, the graphic designers Munari and Veronesi. Utmost attention to design and visual communication was very much the firm's guiding philosophy in all areas of activity. It is not surprising then that Olivetti himself considered the trade-mark to be a core element of the complex system of corporate identity. The importance ascribed to this elementary and frontline component has made for an outstanding graphics design legacy. The fact that Olivetti is cited as the first example of in the world of a coordinated image is cause for pride. To complete the "ICO" acronym, in 1923 it was decided that the firm needed to be endowed with an appropriate logotype. The first was once more designed by the firm's founder who chose lettering with a floral flair. The logotype was next designed again in 1934, this time by Xanti Schawinski (see Illy) who had trained at the Bauhaus and was a collaborator of the Boggeri studio. The use of lower case lettering throughout was an absolute novelty for the times. In 1947 the logotype underwent changes by Marcello Nizzoli who spaced out the letters and did away with the serifs. A trade-mark created in 1954 and familiarly known as the "Greek spiral" was also the work of this designer. A logotype featuring modified "dark black Etruscan" lettering was designed by Giovanni Pintori in 1960. The real novelty came in 1971 when yet another logotype appeared created by the Swiss designer Walter Ballmer. Essentially, what made it different was that it possessed solidity without being hard, a full body without being static. The only sharp character was the letter "v", while the dots on the letters "i" had rounded corners at the top and square ones at the bottom and were set above a rod with similar features but the other way around. Rounded angles express ease and when they are portrayed on chunky characters they also suggest composed, un-flurried strength.

Referenced website: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olivetti_S.p.A.

Collection