An Italian story: Olivetti

I like the stories of the past, where small companies led with passion and courage faced challenges that today seem small and insignificant, but at that time were of a unimaginable greatness.

This time I want to talk about an Italian company, Olivetti, born in 1908 and dedicated to innovation in the field of mechanical, electronic and computer products.

This company began producing typewriters and calculating tools such as mechanical and electromechanical Divsumma14 the first calculator in the world with the four operations and printing (1948).

Divsumma14

In the 1957 the first mainframe computer called Elea and in the 1962 the first "Personal Computer" called Programma101:

It worked with the precision of 22 digits and 15 fixed-point decimal. Programming language was similar to Assembler, but simpler. 

For more (but this voice is incomplete): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olivetti

Now the good times when passion drove innovation are over.
Only the big companies for reasons of economic power can meet the challenge in designing and manufacturing their idea completely.