5 Olivetti Room
The history of Italian computing is closely linked to the story of Olivetti. In this room we present two of its large computers, both from the ELEA series, and some examples of Olivetti desktop computers. The acronym ELEA stands for “Electronic Arithmetic Computer”, but the name was also chosen as a reference to the ancient Greek colony of Elea.
Research on these mainframe computers began in the mid-1950s with a small team of researchers led by Mario Tchou. In 1957 they built the so-called Macchina Zero, the prototype of the series, which was once humorously described as “a rather unsightly heap”.
In 1959 Olivetti began renting out the ELEA 9003, the third model in the series and the first to be commercially available. It was also the first fully transistor-based computer produced by the company. The Elea 6001 was later designed as a smaller version, intended for commercial and scientific applications such as banks, large companies, and universities.
In collaboration with the Institute for Applications of Computing in Rome, Olivetti began work on the 9104 model in 1964. Despite the premature deaths of Adriano Olivetti and Mario Tchou, the project continued even after Olivetti’s electronics division was sold to the American multinational General Electric.
This was not the end of Olivetti’s story. The company continued producing its famous typewriters and calculators, and later entered the world of personal computers.
