Barbaricina, Tuscany. Adriano Olivetti brings Mario Tchou to the company and tasks him with forming a working group that, in collaboration with the University of Pisa, aims to design and build an all-Italian electronic calculator, at Enrico Fermi’s suggestion. This will use the 150 million lire already allocated (for a synchrotron built later in Frascati) for the Pisan vacuum tube calculator. Mario Tchou will build the largest Olivetti Elea, the largest supercomputer of its time, with 40 built. Mario Tchou (Rome, 1924 – Santhià, November 9, 1961) is an Italian electronics engineer. Born in Rome in 1924, the son of Evelyn Waung and diplomat Tchou Yin, who worked at the Imperial Chinese Consulate to the Vatican, he began his studies in Italy, later graduating from Brooklyn Polytechnic in the United States. At the age of 28, he was invited to teach at Columbia University in New York. Mario Tchou died in a car accident on November 9, 1961, at just 37, while traveling to Ivrea to discuss the design of a new transistorized hardware architecture. Tchou’s sudden death, a year after Adriano Olivetti’s premature death, marked the end of the Elea project. Thus ended an important era for Italian electronics. The other members of the Barbaricina boys’ group were: Ettore Sottsass, Giorgio Sacerdoti, Remo Galletti, Franco Filippazzi, Giuseppe Calogero, Pier Giorgio Perotto, Ottavio Guarracino, Lucio Borriello, Luciano Nicelli, and Martin Friedman.
