Pier Giorgio Perotto (

Turin Turin ( , Piedmontese: ; it, Torino ) is a city and an important business and cultural centre in Northern Italy. It is the capital city of Piedmont and of the Metropolitan City of Turin, and was the first Italian capital from 1861 to 1865. The ...

, December 24, 1930 –

Genoa Genoa ( ; it, Genova ; lij, Zêna ). is the capital of the Italian region of Liguria and the sixth-largest city in Italy. In 2015, 594,733 people lived within the city's administrative limits. As of the 2011 Italian census, the Province of ...

, January 23, 2002) was an Italian electrical engineer and inventor. Working for the manufacturer

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 ...

, he led a design team that built the

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 ...

, one of the world's first

programmable calculator Programmable calculators are calculators that can automatically carry out a sequence of operations under control of a stored program. Most are Turing complete, and, as such, are theoretically general-purpose computers. However, their user inter ...

Career

Graduated at the

Turin Polytechnic The Polytechnic University of Turin ( it, Politecnico di Torino) is the oldest Italian Public university, public Institute of technology, technical university. The university offers several courses in the fields of Engineering, Architecture, Urba ...

, Perotto taught for many years at the same University and published several books and articles regarding strategy, business organization and technology. He began his career at Fiat and later on moved to the machine company Olivetti. Working as General Director of projects and research at the

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 ...

’s company, he played a major role in the transformation of this multinational company from a mechanical to electronics and systems company. In the 1970s, he designed other computers at Olivetti, e.g. the

Olivetti P6060 The Olivetti P6060 was the first personal computer with a built-in floppy disk. It was presented in April 1975 by the Italian manufacturer Olivetti at the Hannover fair alongside the smaller P6040 that stored data on proprietary 2.5-inch myla ...

, the first personal computer with integrated floppy-disk drive, the

Olivetti P6040 The Olivetti P6040 was a personal computer, described by its maker as a personal minicomputer. The P6040 was programmable in Mini BASIC and featured a floppy disk drive that used proprietary 2.5-inch sleeveless disks called "Minidisk". It was ...

and the Olivetti P6066. Together with Sergio Raimondi, Perotto launched FINSA Consulting in 1997, becoming the president since its foundation. After this moment he turned himself into a committed teacher and a prolific writer, writing with many essays (in Italian) about business management and future of computing. In 1991, he earned the Leonardo da Vinci Award for having developed a ground-breaking machine, the Programma 101, an early programmable calculator. The 12222 Perotto, a

main belt The asteroid belt is a torus-shaped region in the Solar System, located roughly between the orbits of the planets Jupiter and Mars. It contains a great many solid, irregularly shaped bodies, of many sizes, but much smaller than planets, called ...

asteroid, discovered in 1982 at the Osservatorio San Vittore in

Bologna Bologna (, , ; egl, label=Emilian language, Emilian, Bulåggna ; lat, Bononia) is the capital and largest city of the Emilia-Romagna region in Northern Italy. It is the seventh most populous city in Italy with about 400,000 inhabitants and 1 ...

, is named after him.

Programma 101

The innovative calculator, also known as Perottina, named after its inventor, was one of the first electronic desktop calculators in history purposely designed to be programmable. Programma 101 was officially launched at the 1964 New York World's Fair, attracting major interest from the public and the press. Volume production started in 1965, selling about 44,000 units primarily in the US market.

NASA The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA ) is an independent agencies of the United States government, independent agency of the US federal government responsible for the civil List of government space agencies, space program ...

bought ten models and used them to plan the

Apollo 11 Apollo 11 (July 16–24, 1969) was the American spaceflight that first landed humans on the Moon. Commander Neil Armstrong and lunar module pilot Buzz Aldrin landed the Apollo Lunar Module ''Eagle'' on July 20, 1969, at 20:17 UTC, ...

landing on the moon.

References

External links

Obituary: Pier Giorgio Perotto, Independent UK, 5 February 2002

101 Project
official site of 101 initiative documentary project. * . * Olivetti

hosted by th
Old Calculator Web Museum
retrieved 2009-12-17.

Old Calculator Web Museum.

*
Olivetti Programma 101 Emulator/Trainer
RetroWiki.es

by Alfredo Logioia. {{DEFAULTSORT:Perotto, Pier Giorgio 1930 births 2002 deaths Engineers from Turin Italian computer scientists Olivetti S.p.A. Polytechnic University of Turin faculty Polytechnic University of Turin alumni 20th-century Italian inventors 20th-century Italian engineers