Technological Excellence

Sandro Osnaghi, a visionary who made Olivetti successful

24 June 2025

3' min read

A conference on 'The Extraordinary Years of Olivetti Informatics' was held in Ivrea a few days ago as a tribute to Sandro Osnaghi (1941-2025), who recently passed away.

It was an opportunity to retrace the history of a little-known decade in Olivetti's history. While the Programma 101 is often celebrated as the first desktop computer produced between 1965 and 1971, the story of Olivetti's excellence in the decade that began in the mid-1970s during which Olivetti was one of the world's largest computer manufacturers is much less well known.

Even before the commercial results, that period saw developments, especially in software, of absolute importance. Here we retrace the salient features of a story of excellence that has unfortunately been underestimated, if not forgotten.

After the great success of the P101 (also known to have been used by NASA) and the TC800, an intelligent terminal widely used in banking and postal services, Olivetti had started the development of a new line of machines and their operating system. These were years in which each manufacturer fully developed its own hardware, its own operating system and, to a large extent, also many of the peripherals. The basic software implementation language was assembler, which made development and maintenance very difficult.

Olivetti decided to use one of the first 16-bit microprocessors, the Zilog Z8001, to develop a new line of machines that, without neglecting its strong presence in the banking sector, would also be suitable for a broader set of applications, especially real-time.

The operating system, MOS - Multifunctional Operating System was developed entirely in-house, at Olivetti's Ivrea and Cupertino sites, using an extended Pascal with functionality for concurrent programming.

The MOS, whose development had cost more than 850 man-years, could handle several competing application environments and numerous jobs, and was also scalable to machines of increasing power.

It was a real-time operating system, capable of supporting software development, data processing, scientific, technical, banking and process control applications, in a distributed environment.

Thanks to these absolutely innovative features for the time, significant applications were based on the MOS, whose stories, unknown to the general public at the time as today, never received the recognition they deserved.

One is emblematic of the spirit that animated the group of designers led by Sandro Osnaghi: in 1979, the Japanese government decided that only computers capable of handling the thousands of KANJI ideograms should be used. In order not to risk being forced out of the Japanese market, Olivetti initiated a complex project, as technically it was necessary to manage the entire set of peripherals in an integrated manner to resolve the handling of ideograms from the keyboard, on screen, and in print. Only thanks to the MOS architecture was it possible to meet the Japanese government's requirements in good time.

The cases of the Israeli Leumi Bank and the Dutch ABN Bank were other huge successful projects, where the competition was beaten due to the superior technical characteristics of the MOS.

The software factory used for software development was also state-of-the-art: based on the Unix systems developed by the University of Berkeley and Digital machines (PDP-11 and Vax), it allowed software to be developed interactively, moving away from the boards still prevalent at the time.

A whole family of compilers for the major languages then in use was developed, including Pascal, C, FORTRAN, COBOL, Basic, Smalltalk.

Collaboration with the most prestigious American universities on the West Coast had led to the creation, in the heart of Silicon Valley, of the Olivetti Advanced Technology Center, where a group of artificial intelligence researchers had already been established in the early 1980s.

The advent of commercial versions of Unix, the standardisation of minisystems based on commercial 32-bit microprocessors, and the availability of relational databases, Oracle in primis, accelerated the gradual disappearance of proprietary systems, making hardware and the operating system a commodity whose choice was determined by pure price considerations, thus losing the lever of customer loyalty.

Interesting, unknown and forgotten stories of technical excellence due to a handful of young designers, led by a visionary leader.

SDA Bocconi School of Management