Museum of Computing Machinery

The Olivetti Programma 101 is one of the jewels of our collection. Advertised at the time as the first desktop computer in history, it is the meeting point between the electronic scientific calculator and the Personal Computer: it competes with many others for the title of the first PC in history. Interaction occurred via the keyboard and printer, and its programs were written on magnetic cards that could be inserted and exchanged. When it was presented in October 1965 at the BEMA show in New York, it amazed spectators with its size: they thought it was a terminal connected to a larger computer. Although it was Turing equivalent, it had limited memory and was certainly aimed at calculation rather than data management. In promotional films it was declared "portable", shown used by a child and a girl both by a swimming pool and in a bathtub, in defiance of electrical safety notions. 40,000 copies were sold in the USA alone, for 3000 dollars each: equivalent to 30,000 euros today. They were purchased by NASA and the American Defense, used for both space travel and aerial bombings. Built by the group led by Pier Giorgio Perotto, the so-called Perottina is an icon of design, a turning point in the history of computers and an Italian pride.