Then they heard about a working model of the ELEA 9003, Olivetti’s first commercial mainframe, introduced in 1959. They lost no time tracking it down.
This 9003 had originally belonged to a bank in Siena, where it was used for payroll, managing accounts, calculating interest rates, and the like. In 1972, the bank donated the computer to a high school in the Tuscan hill town of Bibbiena. And there it’s been ever since. Today, former Olivetti employees periodically travel to the ISIS High School Enrico Fermi to tend to the machine.
A unique piece of computing history that must be saved at all costs.
Thom Holwerda,
This is a common refrain from you Thom, but it’s always mentioned as though it is self evident. Would you elaborate on what makes it important to you? And what should humanity do with all it’s old tech when it’s no longer practical to keep?
“All old tech” probably isn’t worth saving. But “the last unit of the first product line in a particular class of device from a company, produced 60 years ago, surely warrants some attention, I would think. Similarly to the way we protect endangered species and national heritage sites, etc. I think in this particular case the value is self evident.
WossMan,
There are so many now-defunct companies and products though. Which ones merit salvation? Is it the ones that made the most money or had the most customers? What exactly is it that makes a piece of technology worth saving for humanity to look back on. I really don’t think it makes sense to leave it to “self evident” logic because I don’t think it’s self evident at all.
Incidentally early in my carrier I worked at a company that built a “voice annunciation” telephone/PLC interface device that industrial customers like kodak, toyota, etc would use to query & control machinery over the telephone and get automated alerts via phone/pagers/etc. It was pretty cool & unique stuff back in the day before the dot-com bust, now I can’t find a trace it. Is something like that worth saving? Is an obscure mainframe more valuable to history due to it’s earlier timeframe? I really don’t know, “self-evident” is not a usable guideline. I think it’s a fair question to ask you and Thom what would be a good guideline.
Probably, this is quite an important machine as it was the first commercial transistor-based computer. Mr. Olivetti also founded Società Generale Semiconduttori (SGS), which I am guessing made the transistors used in this device. SGS went on to become ST, which is Europe’s most important (only?) volume manufacturers of microprocessors, akin being the European “Intel”. I am sure that this computer was not kept in the school for doing their payroll or the such, but already as a historical/educational element. In this type of computer you can typically see the each logical and memory element, as they are several mm in size, giving students way more intuition and understanding of how computers work than looking at modern devices, with their complexity too high to comprehend by a single person.
Olivetti has actually been a pioneer in computer engineering and information technology. Moreover, it had a vision that went beyond the mere technological aspect and encompassed the whole idea of what kind of society would be ideal from a human-centered point of view.
In the end, there’s no objective parameter that drives decisions such as “what to save and what to forget”, but we might argue that such decisions are taken on the basis of a general consensus of the experts in the field.
Here’s a link for further reading: http://kvadratinterwoven.com/the-lesson-of-olivetti
IMHO any working computer from the 60’s an earlier is definitely worth saving, regardless. Computers then were very expensive and demand often outstripped supply. As the world moved on, a lot of these machines were seens as outdated junk by the 80’s and 90’s, and a lot met the fate of the scrappers. Now, 30-40 years after those machines were scrapped, we realise that actually, it might have been a good idea to keep some for future generations.
The exact thing happened in transportation. After the phasing out of steam, hundreds and thousands of steam locomotives hit the scrapyard. In fact, a lot of locomotive models were scrapped entirely, with no surviving representative. It’s gotten so bad, that people have actually started making new steam loco’s based on original blueprints, just to have a working representative of that model of steam locomotive.
The same happened with the car too. There is no original Benz patent motorwagen. Puffing Billy was scrapped centuries ago. Some bloke off the TV owns the only working turbine car.
As soon as something becomes obsolete, people throw them away. Then, 50 years later, people are kicking themselves for destroying important parts of humanities history. And we never learn, and carry on destroying our own history through sheer short-sightedness
This reminds me of the Star Trek Next Generation episode “Brothers”, and the exchange between between Data and his creator Soong:
SOONG: Why are humans so fascinated by old things?
If you brought a Noophian to Earth, he’d probably look around and say, tear that old village down, it’s hanging in rags. Build me something new, something efficient. But to a human, that old house, that ancient wall, it’s a shrine, something to be cherished. Again, I ask you, why?
It’s important because it’s the last. If there was millions of those we wouldn’t care.
History is human memory, this is what makes our culture. We learn from our past. This piece of old tech has a lot to tell us. Our modern tech evolved from it. The legacy of it is still here with us in modern tech. We can study it to understand better where we are and why we are here. It gives us great insight on where to go from here. It’s not a second hand picture or paper describing the stuff, it’s the complete, working stuff. It’s important to keep it working so we don’t loose any bit of our history.
If we forget our history we loose insight.
To better understand why that is important, open the explorer in the latest version of Windows 10 and create a file named com1. If you have no knowledge of computer history you won’t understand. The legacy of this computer is real.
Jean Eudes,
Ok, I’d like to get your input to my follow-up post where we have to assess the values of a whole lot of things that are the last of their kind during earlier tech eras. What are the factors that go into that scale? I still want your input too Thom!
The value depends on a lot of factors. The rarity is a great factor. If we are talking about “last of their kinds” like here then it’s great value. Another factor is the age. If it was from 5000 years ago it would be invaluable because there is nobody that would have any memory of it, and therefore it would have more to learn from. Here it is relatively old. Another factor would be the impact it had on people and culture. Here it was a system used commercially by a number of banks and other organisations. It’s great value because we can link it with a lot of other cultural items. We can study it and understand how the banks worked, how people interacted with it. It can explain a lot of things in history. One day we might find a bug in it that would explain major events in human history. Or not. We don’t know but it is important to study it and to keep it working. Another factor I see is the complexity of it. If it was a simple artifact like an old pen, we could broadly understand how it worked and how it affected culture back then, from the description of it in writings. But this kind of artifact is complex and subtle, it can’t be described in full with mere writings. The documentation doesn’t tell it all, the bugs are not documented. There are probably other factors.
Anyway, in this case the value is “a lot”. It is well worth the cost of maintaining it in working order.
Jean Eudes,
Interesting. If I might make an observation though, all technology will become rare and aged in time. Clearly it would be nice to have a bit of everything in the future, but I think there’s a risk that we’ll be leaving gaps for the future. They’ll certainly have samples of the big-name electronics that were big in pop culture, but there was a tremendous amount of innovation happening just 25 years ago by more obscure companies that is already being lost today to say nothing of decades/centuries into the future. Is that something that should be stored for posterity? Or doesn’t it matter because it was a small local brand that didn’t have a big enough role?
Yes, it makes sense to keep things that were impactful on people and culture, Yet “here was a system used commercially by a number of banks and other organizations” describes a lot of tech that I’m not sure people here would consider worthy of preservation. For example, I’ve worked on HVAC systems (now defunct due to consolidation), but in it’s heyday this was used commercially by many businesses in the region, and there’s a good chance that anybody who’s been in the NYC area was in a building serviced by one of these systems. The thing is it’s not very glamorous and it’s not impactful on culture. I doubt anybody could care less about it,
So something like a microphone used in a broadcast TV show like in the Ed Sullivan Theater viewed by millions is culturally important. But the television cameras that recorded the show are probably much less important even if they were more technologically revolutionary. And it’s doubtful anybody would want to keep the HVAC system for the building even if it were technologically impressive, haha.
I thank you for the discussion. I still find It difficult for me to put a finger on the pulse of what makes something important to history. It seems as though part of it is closely related to “stardom” where popularity is an emergent social property and being close to popular people and things makes you popular too. Whether it’s fair or not, any technology touched by famous people like bill gates is going to be preserved just because of the connection to their names even if the technology itself wasn’t really otherwise all that groundbreaking at the time.
The two top criteria for preserving an artifact are:
A – Somebody wants to preserve it.
B – That somebody has the resources to do so, obviously including said artifact.
There is no uber set of criteria anyone must submit to. In the end the collection of artifacts on the planet will be interesting but not that logical.
I saw an Interdata 8/32 preserved and working recently because it was the first non DEC machine to run Unix, thereby proving that an OS written in a high level language could be portable.. Alas it was running OS32 and not Unix. Also the original achievement was a hacker type trying to make a cheap machine. The special achievement only became evident in hindsight. All interesting and illogical.
Final irrelevant anecdote is that I used to build the 3200 Series, successors to this machine.
Huh. I only know Olivetti for typewriters.
Actually Olivetti was a so big player in the history of IT that you never imagined
Just to say one thing they invented the first form of personal computer in 1963.
TWELVE years before Apple I !!!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programma_101
How to forgot the the Quaderno, a subnotebook released in 1992, 15 years before the EEEPC
https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olivetti_Quaderno
Worth to mention the Olivetti Envision, practically the first Mediacenter/Htpc released at the same time of win95, practically 15 years before those (now pervasive) class of machines, and many years before any Matrox/Ati/Nvidia TV capable VGA cards.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olivetti_Envision
Olivetti problems were essentially two.
Product too ahead of its times, and politics.
Adriano Olivetti was often labeled, by other industry leaders and politicians a “communist”, because its innovative measure on workers protection and rights, and so not backed by the Italian governments of the time.
A long sad story.
Wow, this computer is far more interesting than indicated in the article Thom linked to. According to:
https://www.domusweb.it/en/design/2018/03/19/the-elea-9003-by-ettore-sottsass-is-still-in-working-order.html
“…The Olivetti Elea 9003 [is] the first mainframe computer in the world to use integrated circuits, the first mass-produced Italian computer (approximately 40 were made) and the first with an open modular architecture, allowing for configuration with units for memory, calculation and data input, according to the requirements of the client.”
Definitely worth saving.