Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

posted by Fnord666 on Tuesday November 12 2019, @03:11PM   Printer-friendly
from the not-sure-whodunnit dept.

Submitted via IRC for Runaway1956

Hitting the Books: Did the advent of the first desktop computer lead to murder?

Welcome to Hitting the Books. With less than one in five Americans reading just for fun these days, we've done the hard work for you by scouring the internet for the most interesting, thought provoking books on science and technology we can find and delivering an easily digestible nugget of their stories.

The Mysterious Affair at Olivetti: IBM, the CIA, and the Cold War Conspiracy to Shut Down Production of the World's First Desktop Computer
by Meryle Secrest

The world's first desktop computer didn't take shape in a Menlo Park garage or the bowels of a corporate production facility. It was created in a workshop in Northwest Italy owned and operated by the Olivetti family. Already renowned for their mechanical typewriters, the Olivetti pioneered electronic calculation a decade before Apple or IBM, which (as you'll read below) debuted at the New York World's Fair in 1964. The first of its kind, the P101, became an instant smash hit -- everyone from NASA to the US military was clamoring for these highly sought after "super-calculators."

But was the Olivetti family's fortune actually a curse? Shortly after the P101's debut, Adriano Olivetti, the head of the family suffered a mysterious and fatal heart attack at the age of 58, just 18 months before the company's talented engineer, Mario Tchou, died in an equally suspicious car accident. In The Mysterious Affair at Olivetti, author Meryle Secrest reveals the incredible behind-the-scenes story of the first desktop computer.


Original Submission

 
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
  • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday November 13 2019, @02:54AM

    by JoeMerchant (3937) on Wednesday November 13 2019, @02:54AM (#919684)

    The trick was

    I'm sure they all had their own personalities. Mine tended to "burp" in the middle of big files. You could clean the heads and it would work a little better. You could use brand new high quality cassettes and it would work a little better. But, for anything with 8K+ of code, it was nearly pointless, would always screw up at some point.

    After a year+ of screwing around with that, I managed to scrape together $400+ for a floppy disk drive, they were just about stone cold 99% reliable 99% of the time. You had to abuse the 5.25" floppy disks pretty hard to get them to screw up. 88K per disk, and I recall blank disks varied from around $1 to $3 a piece, but the expensive ones really didn't do anything the cheap ones couldn't.

    After I got the floppy drive, I never looked back at cassettes.

    --
    🌻🌻 [google.com]
    Starting Score:    1  point
    Karma-Bonus Modifier   +1  

    Total Score:   2