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Programma 101, the Machine that Changed the World

1. Author: Alessandro Bernard, Paolo Ceretto
2. Director: Alessandro Bernard, Paolo Ceretto
3. Editor: Marco Duretti
4. Photography: Paolo Rapalino
5. Music: Andrea Gattico
6. Sound: Fabio Coggiola
7. Production: Zenit Arti Audiovisive
8. Italy
9. 52 min.
10. 2011

October 4, 1965 - Breaking news in The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Business Week, New York Herald Tribune: “The first desk top computer of the world…”

During the most important world technological exhibition of the time, in New York, the Italian company Olivetti displays its new mechanical calculating machines, but almost conceals a new futurist product, largely underestimated - Programma 101, the first personal computer in history.

However the public discovers it and makes it a huge success. They swarm into the stand. Crowds of curious onlookers and experts wait in lines and force the organizers to set up appropriate control of admissions… This event is the climax of the incredible story of the invention of the first Personal Computer, a small calculating machine designed and built almost under cover by a number of pioneers in the field of IT research. On June 10, 1967, Hewlett Packard paid US$900thousand to Olivetti for infringing the patent of Programma 101 with its model HP9100. “Perotto and I symbolically received one dollar as the inventors of the first personal computer…,” says designer De Sandre.

The film tells the exciting story of the invention that revolutionized the future, laying the foundations for our present, through the actual protagonists and the opinion of international experts.