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Meryle Secrest - The Mysterious Affair at Olivetti: Ibm, the Cia, and the Cold War Conspiracy to Shut Down Production of the World’s First Desktop Computer

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Meryle Secrest The Mysterious Affair at Olivetti: Ibm, the Cia, and the Cold War Conspiracy to Shut Down Production of the World’s First Desktop Computer
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The never-before-told true account of the design and development of the first desktop computer by the worlds most famous high-styled typewriter company, more than a decade before the arrival of the Osborne 1, the Apple 1, the first Intel microprocessor, and IBMs PC5150.
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 Olivettis 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 Olivettis 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.

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Also by Meryle Secrest Elsa Schiaparelli A Biography Modigliani A Life Shoot - photo 1
Also by Meryle Secrest

Elsa Schiaparelli: A Biography

Modigliani: A Life

Shoot the Widow

Duveen: A Life in Art

Somewhere for Me: A Biography of Richard Rodgers

Stephen Sondheim: A Life

Leonard Bernstein: A Life

Frank Lloyd Wright: A Biography

Salvador Dal

Kenneth Clark: A Biography

Being Bernard Berenson: A Biography

Between Me and Life: A Biography of Romaine Brooks

THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A KNOPF Copyright 2019 by Meryle - photo 2

THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK

PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

Copyright 2019 by Meryle Secrest Beveridge

All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and distributed in Canada by Random House of Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto.

www.aaknopf.com

Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Secrest, Meryle, author.

Title: The mysterious affair at Olivetti : IBM, the CIA, and the Cold War conspiracy to shut down production of the worlds first desktop computer / by Meryle Secrest.

Description: First Edition. | New York : Alfred A. Knopf, [2019] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2018059556 (print) | LCCN 2019009701 (ebook) | ISBN 9780451493668 (ebook) | ISBN 9780451493651 (hc)

Subjects: LCSH: Ing. C. Olivetti & C. Divisione elettronicaHistory. | Computer industryItalyHistory20th century. | Computer scienceItalyHistory20th century.

Classification: LCC HD9696.2.I82 (ebook) | LCC HD9696.2.I82 S43 2019 (print) | DDC 338.7/6213916094509048dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018059556

Ebook ISBN9780451493668

Cover image: Olivetti Programma 101. Museo Nazionale della Scienza e della Tecnologia Leonardo da Vinci, Milan. Wikimedia Creative Commons

Cover design by Kelly Blair

v5.4

ep

For Desire, David, Philip, Matthew, Lidia, the two Annas, Annalisa, Elisa, Albertina, Francesca, Beniamino, Franco, Gregorio, Domenico, Milton, Roberto B., and all those others whose generous help made this book possible. And in memory of Roberto Olivetti.

Of truth we know nothing, for truth lies at the bottom of a well.

Democritus

Vespasiano da Bisticci asked Federiqo da Montefeltro, first Duke of Urbino, what is necessary in ruling a kingdom; the Duke replied, essere umanoto be human.

Kenneth Clark, Civilisation

Contents
Preface

This book came about in a curious way. Like most authors, I had assembled a collection of short stories but had never sold any of them. One of them seemed rather better realized, so I read it carefully. It described a weekend in Washington I had spent with Roberto, the son of Adriano Olivetti, the charismatic figure who had guided the fortunes of this family-owned, Italian office equipment company during and after World War II. My good friend, Caroline Scott Despard, had fallen in love with Roberto when she was living in Italy after the war. However she broke the engagement, moved back to the U.S., and was planning to marry someone else that particular Halloween Saturday night of 1964. Roberto, who happened to be in New York, called her out of the blue. He wanted to fly to Washington and take her out to dinner. She, in a panic, called me. She was bringing her new amour, Sam, to the dinner without telling Roberto. Would I come too? I joined them rather reluctantly and spent what was left of the weekend taking Roberto around the city.

I never saw Roberto again. I discovered that in Dinner with Roberto I had attempted a character study of this interesting engineer, a personal portrait, because I never asked him about his company, which, as I understood eventually, was in crisis just at that moment. It suddenly became important to know whatever had happened to Roberto. I looked up his obituaries. He died in 1985 at the age of fifty-seven. The obituaries would not give the cause of death. For reasons that will become clear, I was convinced he must have died in a car accident. I persisted and finally made telephone contact with Robertos only child, Desire, living in Italy. That illuminating conversation led to other discoveries. These included the news that Olivetti had invented the worlds first desktop computer, a fact that is not reported in most computer histories. The company itself is now defunct. I found I had opened the door upon a Cold War mystery and a major industrial spy story with the Olivetti family as its victims. This account is the result.

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 wintersIvrea, 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 millers 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 millers 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 creak and groan and bats wheel over the chimneys. The whole town is transfixed, as if a painted ship upon a painted ocean.

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