Museum of Computing Machinery

In Italy, the history of typewriters began in the sixteenth century in Venice, but the main protagonist is the Olivetti company, which was founded in 1908 in Ivrea. An icon of this era was the Lettera 32, from 1963, loved by journalists and writers for its design by Marcello Nizzoli. From the 1960s, electronics revolutionized the sector: an example is the Underwood 650, produced when the American brand had already joined the Olivetti group. The advent of personal computers in the 1970s marked the decline of typewriters, but brought text correction, copy-paste, search and replace, and spell check tools, already existing in mainframes, into homes. In 1983, while Microsoft launched Word, the Olivetti M24 offered an example of the growing spread of this technology. In 1990, Steve Jobs' NeXT Station, the workstation on which Tim Berners-Lee developed the World Wide Web, transformed writing into a collective act, anticipating the era of interconnected texts.