Olivetti S.p.A. is an Italian manufacturer of computers, tablets, smartphones, printers and other such business products as calculators and fax machines.

Olivetti produced Italy's first electronic computer, the transistorised Elea 9003, in 1959, and purchased the Underwood Typewriter Company that year.

In order to qualify for new loans, bankers made it a condition that the company's electronic division be sold to General Electric.

[17] In 1986, the company acquired Triumph-Adler, a major office equipment manufacturer based in Germany that also produced typewriters, from Litton Industries of the United States.

[22] [A] preoccupation with design developed into a comprehensive corporate philosophy, which embraced everything from the shape of a space bar to the color scheme for an advertising poster.

From the 1940s to the 1960s, Olivetti industrial design was led by Marcello Nizzoli, who was responsible for the Lexicon 80 and the portable Lettera 22 typewriters, which were released in 1948 and 1950 respectively.

[26][27] In 1954, Mario Tchou joined Olivetti and was in put in charge of a team responsible for creating a commercial computer.

[30][7] In 1999 Michele De Lucchi designed the Art Jet 10 inkjet printer, which was also awarded the Compasso d'Oro, and in 2001,[7] the Gioconda calculator.

The Editor 5 from 1969 was the top model of that series, with proportional spacing and the ability to support justified text borders.

In 1972 the electromechanical typeball machines of the Lexicon 90 to 94C series were introduced, as competitors to the IBM Selectric typewriters, the top model 94c supported proportional spacing and justified text borders like the Editor 5, as well as lift-off correction.

Before the advent of dailywheel and electronic machines (and subsequently the personal computers and word processing software) — Olivetti and the other major manufacturers faced strong competition from typewriters from Asia, including Brother Industries and Silver Seiko Ltd. of Japan.

Although 40 large commercial 9003 and over 100 smaller 6001 scientific machines were completed and leased to customers to 1964, low sales, loss of two key managers and financial instability caused Olivetti to withdraw from the field in 1964.

[45] It was saved from the sale of the computer division to GE thanks to an employee, Gastone Garziera, who spent successive nights changing the internal categorization of the product from "computer" to "calculator", so leaving the small team in Olivetti and creating some awkward situations in the office, since that space was now owned by GE.

The same year Olivetti produced its M10 laptop computer,[50] an 8085-based workalike of the successful Radio Shack TRS-80 Model 100, which it marketed in Europe.

[51] These were the first laptops to sell in million-unit quantities, though the Olivetti M10 [it] itself only attained sales figures in the tens of thousands and went out of production within two years.

During the 1980s and 1990s Olivetti continued to release PC compatible machines, facing mounting competition from other brands.

Olivetti did attempt to recover its position by introducing the Envision in 1995,[52] a full multimedia PC, to be used in the living room; this project was a failure.

In the 1990s, Olivetti's computer businesses were in great difficulty, reportedly because of the competition from US vendors and new cheap manufacturers for PC components in Taiwan like ASUS, MSI, Gigabyte and others from which local system builders profited much to offer cheaper PCs than Olivetti did with their own designs.

With Digital's finances under pressure, posting quarterly losses and incurring costs around redundancies, the company sold its stake – noted as amounting to 7.8% – for $150 million.

[citation needed] In 1999, The Luxembourg-based company Bell S.A. acquired a controlling stake in Olivetti, but sold it to a consortium including the Pirelli and Benetton groups two years later.

In a take-over battle against Deutsche Telekom and other potential bidders that initially seem to have been settled in Deutsche Telecom's favour, with an $82 billion merger reportedly agreed in April 1999,[57] Olivetti won out and controlled 52.12% of former monopoly Telecom Italia, Italy's #1 fixed-line and mobile phone operator.

In March 2011 Olivetti began producing the OliPad, its first tablet computer, featuring a ten-inch screen, 3G, WiFi, Bluetooth connectivity, Nvidia Tegra 2, Android 2.2.2 and a 1024 x 600 display.