Olivetti computers

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.

[5][6] The same year Olivetti produced its M10 laptop computer,[7] a 8085-based workalike of the successful Radio Shack TRS-80 Model 100, which it marketed in Europe.

[8] 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.

[10] Intended to replace Olivetti's existing Linea Uno (L1) range of multiuser systems, introduced in 1981, the reported $250 million investment in the LSX line by Olivetti was seen as a necessary measure to update its range, bringing increased performance, offering an upgrade path to existing customers (with a promise that existing L1 systems could be upgraded with a new processor card), and preserving a degree of control over product designs that would not have been possible by merely selling or adapting products from AT&T, at that time a significant shareholder in the company.

For the high-end LSX models, Olivetti employed technologies from Edge Computer, an Arizona-based company pursuing higher-performance processor designs offering a degree of compatibility with the Motorola 68000 architecture.

[15] That same year, the company presented their 80486-based next generation of workstations, with Olivetti's CP486 (Computing Platform 486) model (with EISA bus) being shown at CeBit.

[20] This partnership eventually led to the introduction of the LSX 7000 range of workstations and servers employing Digital's Alpha CPU in 1994.

[22] Olivetti did attempt to recover its position by introducing the Envision in 1995,[23] a full multimedia PC, to be used in the living room; this project was a failure.