![Olivetti Elea Triennale di Milano](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/58/Olivetti_Elea_Triennale_di_Milano.jpg)
The Elea was a series of
mainframe computers
Olivetti
Olivetti S.p.A. is an Italian manufacturer of computers, tablets, smartphones, printers and other such business products as calculators and fax machines. Headquartered in Ivrea, in the Metropolitan City of Turin, the company has been par ...
developed starting in the late 1950s. The system, made entirely with transistors for high performance, was conceived, designed and developed by a small group of researchers led by
Mario Tchou Mario Tchou (1924–1961), was an Italian engineer, of Chinese descent, a pioneer of computer science in Italy. Mario Tchou was an engineer who led a group of scientists from the University of Pisa to invent, in 1959, the Olivetti Elea, world most p ...
(1924–1961), with industrial design by
Ettore Sottsass
Ettore Sottsass (Innsbruck, Austria 14 September 1917 – Milan, Italy 31 December 2007) was a 20th century Italian architect, noted for also designing furniture, jewellery, glass, lighting, home and office wares, as well as numerous buildings an ...
. The ELEA 9001 was the first solid-state computer designed and manufactured in Italy. The acronym ELEA stood for ''Elaboratore Elettronico Aritmetico'' (Arithmetical Electronic Computer, then changed to ''Elaboratore Elettronico Automatico'' for marketing reasons) and was chosen with reference to the ancient
Greek colony
Greek colonization was an organised colonial expansion by the Archaic Greeks into the Mediterranean Sea and Black Sea in the period of the 8th–6th centuries BC.
This colonization differed from the migrations of the Greek Dark Ages in that i ...
of
Elea, home of the
Eleatic school of philosophy. About forty units were placed with customers. In August 1964, only a few years after releasing the 9003,
[Giuditta Parolini ''Olivetti Elea 9003: Between Scientific Research and Computer Business'', in: , page 37 and ff] Olivetti's mainframe business was sold to
GE.
Generations
![Olivetti_Elea_9003](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a8/Olivetti_Elea_9003.jpg)
ELEA 9001: (Macchina Zero - Machine Zero) prototype was made with vacuum tubes, but used
germanium transistors for the
tape drive
A tape drive is a data storage device that reads and writes data on a magnetic tape. Magnetic tape data storage is typically used for offline, archival data storage. Tape media generally has a favorable unit cost and a long archival stability.
...
system. The system was completed in spring 1957 and was later sent to
Ivrea
Ivrea (; pms, Ivrèja ; ; lat, Eporedia) is a town and ''comune'' of the Metropolitan City of Turin in the Piedmont region of northwestern Italy. Situated on the road leading to the Aosta Valley (part of the medieval Via Francigena), it strad ...
where for six years it controlled the Olivetti production warehouses. The machine was a prototype.
ELEA 9002: (Macchina 1V - Machine 1V), 1958, was a prototype with printed circuits and optimized design, much faster than its predecessor and utilizing silicon transistors for the management of tape drives. The machine was used as a test for the transistors, to establish if they were more reliable and economic than vacuum tubes. This model was installed at the Olivetti headquarters in Via Clerici in Milan and presented at the Milan Trade Fair in April 1959.
It was also awarded the
Compasso d'Oro in 1959.
ELEA 9003: (Macchina 1T - Machine 1T), prototype in 1958, announced in 1959,
designed entirely in discrete (
diode–transistor logic
Diode–transistor logic (DTL) is a class of digital circuits that is the direct ancestor of transistor–transistor logic. It is called so because the logic gating function (e.g., AND) is performed by a diode network and the amplifying function ...
), and following the previous year's announcement of the
IBM 7070
IBM 7070 was a decimal-architecture intermediate data-processing system that was introduced by IBM in 1958. It was part of the IBM 700/7000 series, and was based on discrete transistors rather than the vacuum tubes of the 1950s. It was the compa ...
transistorized computer, was one of the first fully transistorized commercial computers.
It was leased to about 40 individual customers, of which the first (Elea 9003/01) was installed at the textile company
Marzotto
The Marzotto Group is an Italian textile manufacturer, based in Valdagno.
Created in 1836 as the ''Lanificio Luigi Marzotto & Figli''. In 2005 Marzotto Group's textile business separated from Valentino Fashion Group.
The Group manufactures wo ...
and second (Elea 9003/02) to
Monte dei Paschi di Siena
Banca Monte dei Paschi di Siena S.p.A. (), known as BMPS or just MPS, is an Italian bank. Tracing its history to a mount of piety founded in 1472 () and established in its present form in 1624 (), it is the world's oldest or second oldest bank ...
. Later this unit was donated for educational purposes. Other mainframes were leased to insurance companies and energy companies.
The Olivetti computers competed directly with foreign manufacturers such as
IBM and
Ferranti
Ferranti or Ferranti International plc was a UK electrical engineering and equipment firm that operated for over a century from 1885 until it went bankrupt in 1993. The company was once a constituent of the FTSE 100 Index.
The firm was known ...
, but received no special consideration from the Italian government. Typical applications were payroll, inventory and accounting.
ELEA 6001: A smaller version of the 9003 with the intent of either scientific or commercial use - two separate versions (6001/S and 6001/C) being created respectively for these purposes. Presented at the Milan Trade Fair in 1961. Around 150 units were produced. Unlike previous models, third party programming languages including
COBOL and
Fortran were used, in addition to a specific program created by mathematician
Mauro Pacelli.
ELEA 4001: A computer of reduced size and power compared to previous models, intended to be used in businesses. It was designed to be a stand-alone system but could also be connected with other computers. No examples of the ELEA 4001 are known to have survived to this day.
ELEA 4115/ GE 115: Initially released as the ELEA 4115 and later renamed to GE 115, after
General Electric
General Electric Company (GE) is an American multinational conglomerate founded in 1892, and incorporated in New York state and headquartered in Boston. The company operated in sectors including healthcare, aviation, power, renewable en ...
acquired the Olivetti Electronics Division. The computer was part of the GE 100 line, and was the smallest of these models. Around 5000 were sold worldwide.
Features
![Olivetti Elea Back](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/07/Olivetti_Elea_Back.jpg)
The computing power (approximately 8 to 10,000 instructions per second) was higher than that of competitors for several years. Uptime - as with all computers of the time - was less than 50%, especially in the tape device.
This meant the computer was available for productive work only part of the day, and then returned to technicians for maintenance.
The need to obtain 300,000 highly reliable transistors and diodes for each computer, convinced
Adriano Olivetti to build a foundry called SGS in cooperation with the company Telettra . SGS (Società Generale Semiconduttori) later became part of
STMicroelectronics.
The computer was equipped with words of 6 bits, plus a parity bit, and word mark bit, with ferrite core memories. Memory was organized in six-bit characters, representing letters, numerals and punctuation. The memory cycle frequency was 100 kHz, with a capacity between 20 and 160 thousand words. The computer did not have an operating system and could be programmed using machine language. The 9003 did not have
floating point
In computing, floating-point arithmetic (FP) is arithmetic that represents real numbers approximately, using an integer with a fixed precision, called the significand, scaled by an integer exponent of a fixed base. For example, 12.345 can b ...
arithmetic instructions since it was intended for commercial data processing. All instructions were of fixed length (eight characters).
Mass storage for the 9003 was on magnetic tape. Drum, disk and diskette memory was developed but never used at a customer site. Input and output was through punched paper tape or punched cards, and printing on a
line printer
A line printer prints one entire line of text before advancing to another line. Most early line printers were
impact printers.
Line printers are mostly associated with unit record equipment and the early days of digital computing, but the ...
. A
teleprinter
A teleprinter (teletypewriter, teletype or TTY) is an electromechanical device that can be used to send and receive typed messages through various communications channels, in both point-to-point and point-to-multipoint configurations. Init ...
was used as operator console to control the machine, with a
front panel
A front panel was used on early electronic computers to display and allow the alteration of the state of the machine's internal registers and memory. The front panel usually consisted of arrays of indicator lamps, digit and symbol displays, t ...
display for debugging and maintenance.
The industrial design of the system followed Olivetti esthetic and functional standards. Cabinets were about 1 metre high and interconnected by overhead conduits, so the system did not require the
raised floor
A raised floor (also raised flooring, access floor(ing), or raised-access computer floor) provides an elevated structural floor above a solid substrate (often a concrete slab) to create a hidden void for the passage of mechanical and electrical ...
of other mainframe designs. Each cabinet contained a subsystem (processor, memory, tape drives).
[http://www.site.uottawa.ca/~luigi/papers/elea.htm My first two computers]
Developments
![Paolo Monti - Servizio fotografico - BEIC 6346461](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/bd/Paolo_Monti_-_Servizio_fotografico_-_BEIC_6346461.jpg)
The Elea 6000 series were versions with reduced processing power and cost. They were originally designed for scientific computing with floating-point arithmetic, 4-bit memory width, then later developed for commercial applications (4+4 bits), with a microprogram memory. About 170 units were produced. The Elea 4000, was a later series that was successfully sold by
General Electric
General Electric Company (GE) is an American multinational conglomerate founded in 1892, and incorporated in New York state and headquartered in Boston. The company operated in sectors including healthcare, aviation, power, renewable en ...
after it purchased Olivetti's computer interests. Over 40,000 units were sold with the GE model names GE 105, GE-115, GE-125, and GE-130.
The laboratories had also begun to develop a successor to the 9000 series that features a new hardware architecture. The company developed a programming language Palgol, a derivative of
ALGOL
ALGOL (; short for "Algorithmic Language") is a family of imperative computer programming languages originally developed in 1958. ALGOL heavily influenced many other languages and was the standard method for algorithm description used by the ...
, and an assembler named Psyche. However, only a limited amount of system and utility software was provided by Olivetti to customers. The death of the engineers Olivetti and Tchou put a brake on laboratory work, which was subsequently sold to General Electric. This marked the end of Elea computers.
Even though the electronics division of Olivetti had been sold off, the knowledge gained was applied in the development of the successful
Programma 101
The Olivetti Programma 101, also known as Perottina or P101, is one of the first "all in one" commercial desktop programmable calculators, although not the first.
Produced by Italian manufacturer Olivetti, based in Ivrea, Piedmont, and invented b ...
electronic calculator.
References
External links
ELEA 9003: storia di una sfida industriale/ Gli elaboratori elettronici Olivetti negli anni 1950-1960
LEA 9003: history of an industrial challenge / Olivetti computers in the years 1950-1960 Franco Filippazzi, University of Udine - 21 May 2008, In Italian
Photo and Italian text of the last surviving 9003*
*
Computer-related introductions in 1959
Transistorized computers
Olivetti computers
{{Olivetti computers