The article mentions worker housing and urban planning in passing, then moves on. But that was the strategy. Ivrea wasn't welfare—it was integrated design. Factory, housing, schools, public spaces all operating under one coherent philosophy: machines and lives should both be beautiful and functional.
Search "Olivetti negozio", "fabbrica" or "architettura"—the retail design and factory architecture show it, decades before Apple. But more importantly, search for Adriano's writing on the Community Movement. He believed you couldn't separate good design from good society. The red typewriter wasn't just aesthetics; it was a statement about human dignity.
That's why Olivetti succeeded where technically equivalent competitors didn't. They engineered for humans, not just machines. Beauty, culture, and production were one integrated system.
The article's strength—technical rigor and business detail—accidentally proves the weakness: it treats design and culture as separate from engineering. Olivetti proved they're the same thing.
(I have a working M10 from 1983. Still remarkable machine—that tiltable screen, the integrated design. They were still building for humans, not just specs.)
Ps.Adriano is my biological grandfather. Pps.i posted the link before, but didnt get much traction.
Admin at the linked domain.
It's been said that they inspired the Apple stores.
https://www.archdaily.com/155074/ad-classics-olivetti-showro...
https://www.printmag.com/daily-heller/the-daily-heller-i-los...
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Such a nice memory :)
I also had a 'faulty' Olivetti inkjet printer that was written off under warranty with a mysterious fault. I eventually managed to fix it by bending the metal paper detector arm so that it slotted properly into the optical sensor - it was a little out of whack and the sensor sometimes couldn't work out whether there was paper in the tray.
It needed a good clean, and some parts needed bent back into shape, but after that it worked like a dream. The mechanism for the tab stops is fantastic.
They likely think about that missed opportunity deeply in their corporate culture.
I don't know the story of how they let that get away.
"Such was the secrecy surrounding the ARM CPU project that when Olivetti were negotiating to take a controlling share of Acorn in 1985, they were not told about the development team until after the negotiations had been finalised...
"Olivetti would eventually relinquish majority control of Acorn in early 1996, selling shares to US and UK investment groups to leave the company with a shareholding in Acorn of around 45%."
I've got a scan of that letter and reference somewhere and although I don't remember the ref right now, I know I eventually found which font it was here:
https://luc.devroye.org/fonts-96540.html
P.S: I've got great memories of my father smoking cigs while typing on his IBM selectric eletric typewriter.