--- title: Olivetti Programma P101/P102 categories: - Computers types: - Professional Computer origins: - Italy years: - '1965' cpus: - Transistors Control params: name: Programma P101/P102 image: /media/museum/photos/olivetti_programma101_system.jpg company: /companies/olivetti company_name: Olivetti specs: - label: NAME value: Programma P101/P102 - label: MANUFACTURER value: Olivetti - label: TYPE value: Professional Computer - label: ORIGIN value: Italy - label: YEAR value: Late  1965 - label: BUILT IN LANGUAGE value: Instructions interpreter - label: KEYBOARD value: 31 keys - Numeric and function keys - label: CPU value: Transistors Control and Arithmetic units - label: SPEED value: Unknown - label: RAM value: 5 x 22 digit registers - label: TEXT MODES value: No display but a 28 chars. per line / 30 cps printer - label: SIZE / WEIGHT value: 48 (W) x 61 (D) x 19 (H) cm. / 29 Kg. - label: I/O PORTS value: Serial connector (P102) - label: BUILT IN MEDIA value: Magnetic card reader/recorder - label: POWER SUPPLY value: Built-in power supply unit - label: PRICE value: $3500 tabs: - photos - adverts - links - docs photos: - title: PROGRAMMA P102 subtitle: '' text: '' image: /media/museum/photos/olivetti_programma101_system_2.jpg - title: TELETYPE CONNECTION subtitle: '' text: A programma P102 connected to a Teletype. image: /media/museum/photos/olivetti_programma101_teletype_1.jpg - title: SUMMARY CARD subtitle: '' text: |- Erich, who kindly sent us summary card pictures, specifies:\ It's the summary card. The originals had some color printing which the early Xerox did not copy well. Pages are truncated at the bottom as government at that time used 8x10½ inch paper rather than 8½x11.\ Our machine had 4K core memory (not delay line), but looking at this information, it must have been 4K bits as there were only a max of 120 commands available for a program. Ollivetti did not give details on word length in bits. Per the hand-drawn diagram on the upper right, if you used more than 48 commands, you began to eat into available register storage. image: /media/museum/photos/olivetti_programma101_summarycard_s1.jpg - title: 'SUMMARY CARD #2' subtitle: '' text: '' image: /media/museum/photos/olivetti_programma101_summarycard_s2.jpg - title: P101 PROGRAM subtitle: '' text: |- This is the radix conversion program that I remembered writing (except it didn't go to hex), taking 43 commands. The program was stored on magnetic card. Unfortunately I did not include a date on it, but I was at West Point between 6 Dec 68 and 1 Oct 70 and the program was probably written months (if not a year) after I got there. Thanks to **Erich** image: /media/museum/photos/olivetti_programma101_progsheet_s1.jpg adverts: - title: FIRST ADVERT subtitle: '' text: Courtesy of **www.computermuseum.it** image: /media/museum/pubs/olivetti_programma101_pub_1.jpg links: - title: ComputerHistory.it url: http://www.computerhistory.it/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=20:p101&catid=17:olivetti&Itemid=139 text: very complete article on the Programma 101 (in italian) - title: Detailed page about the P-101 url: http://www.silab.it/frox/p101 text: '' docs: - title: OLIVETTI PROGRAMMA 101 - GENERAL REFERENCE MANUAL url: null cover: /media/museum/docs/couvs/olivetti-programma101_general-reference-manual.jpg text: |- **OLIVETTI PROGRAMMA 101 - GENERAL REFERENCE MANUAL**\ written by Olivetti  compiled/archived by Giorgio\  type of document : PDF **... READ THE ONLINE VERSION BY CLICKING BELOW :** comments: - author: Kenneth (Sweden) date: Wednesday 16th February 2022 text: 6 March 1967 I started as a young (21 year) computer salesman for Programma 101 at the Olivetti sales office in Gothenburg, Sweden. It was a marvelous machine at that time and a real pleasure to demonstrate at the industries in West Sweden. One bug I remember is that the command B/^ made the printer go wild and start printing the left column. After a few years I got one back from a customer and 1995 I added an image and some info on my website. Two years later a successful US SW entrepreneur found it and I could sell it for a good price. I have also sold Compucorp, Apollo Computers and Datapoint. !978 I started the first computer shop in Sweden selling Commodore PET and Apple II. - author: george (france) date: Tuesday 18th June 2019 text: in autumn 1968 opened the ''IUT informatique'' of Lyon (france). we were teached computing with an Olivetti programma 203 and some teletype connected to GE time sharing running Darthmouth Basic. The (nicely designed) Olivetti programma 203 (and the (little ugly) audit series) as (sort of) first (micro) computer for (very) small company in europe in 70''s was a very good tool (at that time)(but not a success story .. helas) - author: Piero Todorovich (Italia) date: Monday 30th July 2018 text: Please check. The P102 connection was not RS232C compatible. The connection was proprietary (an extention direct-attached to the keyboard and Printer for use by remote systems) - author: Alfredo (Argentina) date: Saturday 2nd June 2018 text: |- Hello to all! I invite you to see pictures and an article I wrote about my P101 in mint condition, the link is this:\ http://www.curtamania.com/curta/database/brand/olivetti/Olivetti$20Programma$20101/index.html\ Best regards, Alfredo - author: David date: Tuesday 15th August 2017 text: Is the price on this ebay site a good price? http://www.ebay.com/itm/152665094101 - author: Mark (Ohio/USA) date: Thursday 29th September 2016 text: 'This particular machine was used on the US game show "It Takes Two" from 1969-70, presumably to compute the average guess for each couple. Credit for it is found in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v$ko5NUslV5hg$feature$youtu.be' - author: Uli (Germany) date: Thursday 13rd November 2014 text: I Have a olivetti programma 101 in good condition. - author: Jos (United Arab Emirates) date: Sunday 12th October 2014 text: Hi, looking for Olivetti Programma 101 for sale in good condition. - author: Dan (USA) date: Thursday 11th September 2014 text: My father worked for Olivetti in Dallas and I had the great pleasure of having a Programma 101 at our house when my father brought one home. Truly a marvelous machine and beautiful too! - author: Giorgio (Switzerland) date: Friday 21st February 2014 text: |- What''s most amazing of this incredibly advanced machine (for the time) is that it was developed \*against\* Olivetti''s establishment will, by a small team of young talented people lead by Ing. Piergiorgio Perotto.\ In fact, in 1964 the management of Olivetti had declared that the company''s future was in mechanics, while electronics was of no interest. Very very farsighted, indeed! - author: salvatore (Italia) date: Sunday 2nd December 2012 text: |- i have it!!\ http://www.subito.it/hobby-collezionismo/olivetti-programma-101-cosenza-52940722.htm?last$1$spoint$ar - author: Chris P (USA) date: Saturday 4th February 2012 text: I used one of these to do my first CAE program at Sheffield University in England in 1969. We were supposed to optimize an Ackerman steering system. Everybody else drew them up - I wrote a program to iterate through the possible geometries. - author: BINON PATRICK (FRANCE) date: Tuesday 27th December 2011 text: |- I have one P101, that was the first computer I used at school in1969. Now I would like to restore it.\ I am looking for service manuals (I allready have one for the mechanical section adjustments).\ As some of the guys on this forum were sellers or service man may be they still have some documents\ Regards\ Patrick - author: Kit Richer (Australia) date: Sunday 19th September 2010 text: This was my first non mainframe computer experience. The machine was bought for the materials guys but they really couldn''t work it out til us engineers got hold of it. We were early into the use of NC machines and used it to calculate movements for a 2 axis mill and a 3 axis bender. We were using it to calulate points using matrix rotation methods which we thought pretty cool at the time. The most complex job was getting a set of exhaust extractors from scale drawing to bending coordinates for a Chrysler Charger especially released for Austrlia''s premier production car race at Bathurst. - author: Herman Protze (USA) date: Wednesday 8th September 2010 text: In 1967± I convinced my Dad to purchase a P101 for his construction testing laboratory business. I programmed and ran payroll for over 25 employees and as well programmed and performed concrete mixture proportions using the P101. Pleasant memories of yore! - author: Ken Cox (USA) date: Friday 27th August 2010 text: My father owned an Olivetti Underwood franchise and I was trained in both repair and sales of the Programma 101 and 203 (accounting machine). I wrote amortization programs for banks that would allow them to charge interest not to exceed a certain interest rate...within .01$. Also wrote state and federal income tax programs for accountants. Was a fabulous machine for its time. - author: Bob Russo (USA) date: Wednesday 18th August 2010 text: My high school in New Haven, CT acquired one in 1968 or 69. One of the instructors brought it home over Thanksgiving weekend to try a program he had written to calculate Pi. It ran from Wednesday night till sometime Sunday before printing it''s answer. I don''t recall how many decimal places, but I''m pretty sure it was over 5. - author: CHIP GETTER (USA) date: Monday 12th July 2010 text: |- I was high school age, working at an engineering/architectural firm. There were commercially-available "packs" by third-parties with programs capable of making the 101 a truly valuable investment. The surveyor''s pack involved a LOT of trig floating point, of course. Those programs could literally run for an hour when you were doing take-offs. There were two lights above the keyboard. A large blue one would flicker during processing and I''d keep poking my head in every 10-15 minutes to see if it was still "thinking". You never wanted to see the blue one stop and the red one illuminate. That meant bad news: usually an overflow and your run was a waste. By the time HP handhelds came around (35/45/55/65), the register paradigm I had learned programming the 101 had me a leg-up when it came to work in RPN. If I recall correctly, Olivetti sold special ruled pads for writing your 101 programs. I think they were green ink on white paper. - author: George Reardon (USA) date: Friday 9th January 2009 text: As it was for many others, the Olivetti Underwood Programma 101 was my first computer. I took a job in June of 1968 at a small company where the person who bought the computer had resigned. Everyone was afraid of it, so they said, "Let the kid use it!" I ended up learning the language from the self-teaching manual and programming a lot of business applications on it. Also, on the night of the presidential election returns of 1968, I taught the machine to play Tic-Tac-Toe and never lose (as long as it moved first.) To do that with such limited instruction capacity required packing the logic of the game into several long numbers, which the program dismantled one digit at a time as a game progressed. - author: Tim Specht (USA) date: Tuesday 10th April 2007 text: I used this machine and a P-602 to learn programming in high school, from 1972 to 1975. Very simple programs were provided in the users manuals, and my classmates and I spent many fond hours learning how to do branching on these two machines. Very simple, compared to today's workhorses, but they were quite something back then! - author: Richard Kuper (Earth) date: Thursday 8th March 2007 text: 'This was the first computer I ever got to use and program. There was this old non-working analog computer sitting in the corner of the math department office at my high school. I was intrigued and wanted to know more about computers. With the assistance of a math teacher we started a computer club in my high school and eventually convinced the powers that be that we needed a computer. They got the Olivetti Underwood Programma 101. It was educational and fun. It had storage and registers and everything! We did what high-school math students would do: we programmed it to generate the Fibonacci sequence! :) I think I still have the user manual somewhere.' - author: Erich Hespenheide (USA) date: Monday 3rd January 2005 text: I programmed the Programma 101 while stationed at West Point NY in 1969 and 1970. I believe the model we used had a 4k CORE memory (one of the first for a desktop calculator). The only program that I remember writing was a radix conversion program decimal-octal-hexidecminal. oc_id: 847 source: url: https://web.archive.org/web/20230608075920/http://www.old-computers.com/museum/computer.asp?c=847 date: '2023-06-08' --- The Programma P101 may be considered as the first programmable electronic desk top calculator in the world. At the time, Olivetti was called **'Olivetti Underwood Corporation'**. The P101 was also the first programmable machine small and medium size companies could afford. Besides several tens of thousands machines were sold, mainly in USA. There were neither microprocessor (not yet invented) nor integrated circuits in the P101, but only transistors, resistors and condensers. Instructions could be executed directly through the keyboard as in a conventional calculator or stored in memory and then executed by the Control and Arithmetic units. The memory holds 9 registers that could store numeric data or program instructions. Each register could store one 22-digit number plus sign and decimal point, or two 11-digit number, or 24 program instructions. Five registers could store instructions, so the maximum length of a program was of 120 instructions.\ Program and data stored in memory could be saved into a magnetic card thanks to a built-in cards reader/recorder. The calculator used a form of 'cache' memory for storing the results of the last operation. This was done with a **Pulse Delay Line**, a device that turned the data into mechanical vibrations along a wire, serial fashion. A sort of 'SAM', Sequentially Accessed Memory.\ The Pulse Delay Line was invented in the 1940's for RADAR and the crude computers of that time . One year later, Olivetti released the **Programma P102** (pictured) which was the same machine but featured a serial RS232 connection and allowed printer, Teletype or paper tape puncher/reader (up to four) to be connected. Thanks to **Gerard Touitou** for information and pictures. --- **Rich Stillman's** memories:\ The Programma 101 was the first "computer" I ever used. I was in high school and the school bought one for the math curriculum. It never got used in the mainstream program but students who wanted to experiment with it could.\ It was pretty much as described, with an instruction set that consisted mostly of the functions on the calculator keypad. Programs were keyed in, and saved onto cards that were about the size of a standard punch card, with a labeling surface on one side and a complete magnetic coating on the other - no wimpy mag stripe here! We used the 101 mainly to implement numerical methods for generating trig functions and the like. **A. Cormier** adds:\ The magnetic cards were a real breakthrough in technology. They were made in plastic, and one side was printed and had place for title of the program, comments etc.; the other side was completely covered with the typical brownish magnetic layer.\ The magnetic track was near the long edge of the card: cards could be turned upside-down to use the track near the other edge of the card, so that each card could store two programs.\ A neat feature was the use of the areas marked V, W, Y, Z. When the card was fed through the reader, it would pop out under the keyboard, in correspondence with the "function" keys V, W, Y, Z. The comment written on the card would therefore appear under each key, a useful reminder of the functions linked to each key in that particular program.\ The P101, and particularly the magnetic card, was covered by a patent (3.495.222 of march 1st 1965) and this gave to Olivetti over $900.000 in royalties by HP alone for the re-use of this technology in the HP9100 series. Everything in the Programma 101 clearly show the very high standards of design and engineering that were adopted in its construction.\ The case, for example, is about the size of a large, old desktop PC (a little bit larger, in effects). It is not build like today's PC by folding a sheet of metal, but to avoid interferences is cast in alluminium, about three millimeters thick and alone it contributes to the machine's weight of about 35 kilograms.\ The exterior was designed by Mario Bellini, a young architect of the Sottsass' team, soon to become one of the top industrial designers of the following years. The Programma 101 earned its place in several museums for its design, and Bellini kept working for many more years for Olivetti and was responsible for some of the other visually wonderful machines (calculators and typewriters) of the following years.