The Mysterious Affair at Olivetti

August 5, 2019
Biographer Secrest (Elsa Schiaparelli) reveals a little-known slice of computer history in her fascinating account of the Italian typewriter company Olivetti, which created the first desktop computer. The company’s story largely centers on its three leaders: first, Camillo Olivetti, then his son, Adriano; and finally Adriano’s son, Roberto. Each led a fascinating life; Camillo was an inventor and Socialist politician, while Adriano, named company director in 1933, plotted to oust Mussolini during WWII with Princess Marie José Charlotte, future queen of Italy. Following the war, Adriano founded a literary journal and his own Socialist political party, all while steering Olivetti toward ever-greater success and renown. (Günter Grass, Cormac McCarthy, and Gore Vidal all used Olivetti typewriters, Secrest notes.) Roberto, meanwhile, inaugurated Olivetti’s electronics division, which began developing the Programma 101, the first desktop computer, in 1962, two years after Adriano’s fatal heart attack. From here, the story takes a dark and bizarre turn, as Secrest speculates he may in fact have been murdered, perhaps by the CIA to prevent him transferring technology to the Soviets and Chinese. Whether one buys into this conspiracy theory, Secrest offers a riveting look at an ambitious and inventive family deserving wider attention.

September 15, 2019
Prolific biographer Secrest (Elsa Schiaparelli, 2014, etc.) delves into a remote corner of Cold War history. Adriano Olivetti (1901-1960) was a man of parts: an intellectual, a devotee of careful planning, a socialist at a time in Italy during which the capitalist economy was controlled by "a tiny elite group of allies who held key minority positions in each others' companies." His evolution was not without its checkered elements; he went along with Mussolini's fascist government for a time, as an expedient, while other family members took an active role in the resistance and helped smuggle Jews out of the country. Yet a socialist he was, with a vision of a postwar nation that did not quite square with that of the American government--in particular, CIA director Allen Dulles, who favored "a double agent ready for action, not an ambitious, left-leaning industrialist who wanted to impose upon American policy his plan for a new Italy, ad nauseam." Olivetti soon went on to take his firm, renowned for its typewriters, into the realm of electronics, developing a mainframe computer, "the first fully transistorized one in the world," that threatened the near monopoly IBM enjoyed on such machines. (Later, Olivetti developed a portable calculator so closely emulated by HP that the Italian company launched and won a copyright suit.) Word came that Olivetti wasn't reluctant to sell the technology to Russia and China, among other potential customers, and not long after, Olivetti was dead, the victim of a heart attack when presumed in the prime of health. A year and a half later, his chief technologist and designer died in a suspicious car crash. Did American intelligence do these dirty deeds? It's not outside the realm of possibility; after all, Secrest writes, the Russians likely assassinated two American scientists involved in missile guidance systems. That much of the author's argument proceeds by inference and suggestion doesn't diminish its plausibility. A competently written story that limns the complex spy-vs.-spy calculus of a time still fresh in memory.

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Starred review from October 1, 2019
Exemplary arts biographer Secrest, whose subjects include Elsa Schiaparelli and Modigliani, enters a new arena as she portrays four generations of the visionary, even revolutionary Olivettis, Jewish Italian industrialists. Once Camillo Olivetti's electrical engineering company attained international success for its fast, sleek typewriters, he moved his large family into an abandoned fifteenth-century convent in the foothills of the Alps. His eldest son, Adriano, a humanitarian with socialist ideals and a passion for innovation, further elevated Olivetti's state-of-the-art design and technology. But Adriano's progressive politics and anti-fascist efforts inadvertently imperiled both company and family when his son Roberto presciently entered the fledgling field of electronics. Secrest brings the extraordinary Olivetti clan vividly to life, reports on highly suspicious deaths, and dramatically illuminates their legendary company's shocking downfall via long-hidden, deeply sordid conspiracies among fascists, Mafiosi, the CIA, IBM, GE, and Fiat to obliterate Olivetti's crowning achievement and marvel of ingenuity, Programma 101, the first desktop computer. Deftly seeded with clues and lavish in intriguing detail, Secrest's many-faceted expos� intensifies with dark surprise as it reveals Cold War acts of sinister politics, ruthless espionage, and covert crimes, and traces the long, grasping tentacles of the American military-industrial complex.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)

October 1, 2019

Biographer Secrest (Being Bernard Berenson) marshals a variety of personal, corporate, and government sources to make the case that the early 1960s deaths of the president of the Olivetti typewriter-turned-business machine company and its electronics laboratory director were not accidents, but rather assassinations timed to prevent Olivetti from introducing a desktop computer to the American market. Most of the book is detailed background of the affairs (business, foreign, extramarital, and otherwise) of the Olivetti Company and its namesake family during the two world wars. With the shift of business machines to tubes and transistors, as well as the Cold War realignment of government and business interests in Italy and America, the Olivetti Co. was poised to expand its offerings to electronic computers abroad. The tale follows the tropes of a man ahead of his time, going up against international interests until the powers that be determine he must be stopped. However, its final speculative chapter fails to produce a smoking gun, only providing circumstantial evidence of these shadowy conspirators tied to the military-industrial complex. VERDICT Unrewarding as a mystery or a technological history, this may still have appeal for Cold War history enthusiasts. [See Prepub Alert, 4/28/19.]--Wade Lee-Smith, Univ. of Toledo Lib.

Copyright 2019 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

June 1, 2019

Pulitzer Prize finalist Secrest delves into the heretofore little-known story of the first desktop computer, developed ten years before the advent of Osborne 1, the Apple 1, et alia, by Italy's Olivetti company. It sold 40,000 units, including to NASA, before the U.S. government filed an antitrust suit in a bid to stop Olivetti and its socialist-idealist leader Adriano Olivetti, whose fatal heart attack was followed 18 months later by the suspicious car-crash death of its top engineer. With a 35,000-copy first printing.

Copyright 2019 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.