Quotes that follow are from various promotional materials and reviews.
ABOUT THE MYSTERIOUS AFFAIR AT OLIVETTI
The never-before-told true account of the design and development of the first desktop computer by the world’s most famous high-styled typewriter company, more than a decade before the arrival of the Osborne 1, the Apple 1, the first Intel microprocessor, and IBM’s PC5150.
The human, business, design, engineering, cold war, and tech story of how the Olivetti company came to be, how it survived two world wars and brought a ravaged Italy back to life, how after it mastered the typewriter business with the famous “Olivetti touch,” it entered the new, fierce electronics race; how its first desktop compter, the P101, came to be; how, within eighteen months, it had caught up with, and surpassed, IBM, the American giant that by then had become an arm of the American government, developing advanced weapon systems; Olivetti putting its own mainframe computer on the market with its desktop prototype, selling 40,000 units, including to NASA for its lunar landings. How Olivetti made inroads into the US market by taking control of Underwood of Hartford CT as an assembly plant for Olivetti’s own typewriters and future miniaturized personal computers; how a week after Olivetti purchased Underwood, the US government filed an antitrust suit to try to stop it; how Adriano Olivetti, the legendary idealist, socialist, visionary, heir to the company founded by his father, built the company into a fantastical dynasty–factories, offices, satellite buildings spread over more than fifty acres–while on a train headed for Switzerland in 1960 for supposed meetings and then to Hartford, never arrived, dying suddenly of a heart attack at fifty-eight . . . how eighteen months later, his brilliant young engineer, who had assembled Olivetti’s superb team of electronic engineers, was killed, as well, in a suspicious car crash, and how the Olivetti company and the P101 came to its insidious and shocking end.
Prof. Mario Tchou was a brilliant young faculty member at Columbia, the son of Chinese diplomats who grew up in Rome. He was already carving a solid reputation as a leader in pioneering technological research when in 1961, he was killed in a car crash under mysterious circumstances on an Italian superhighway. He was the director of Olivetti's electronics division at the time, and that may have had something to do with it.
“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 exposé intensifies with dark surprise and traces the long, grasping tentacles of the American military-industrial complex.”
—Donna Seaman, in a starred review for BOOKLIST
I take some of the negatively toned reviews in major outlets, such as stating that she "attempts to find a cold war conspiracy," as a positive sign. This book looks more interesting than all of the other editor-approved garbage next to it on the new books shelf combined.
