New York World’s Fair. Olivetti presents its new mechanical typewriter, the fruit of years of investment. Then, in a secluded room, it also presents the Programma 101, essentially the first electronic personal computer. It costs $3,200, compared to over $100,000 for a comparable IBM computer. The Programma 101 is portable and can fit on a table (“Desk-top computer,” Business Week headlines). At the fair, it is programmed (with magnetic cards) to print the Keplerian orbit of a satellite on a roll of paper, and the public is astonished, searching for a cable connecting it to a possible hidden mainframe. It has 240 bytes of memory and the processing unit is composed of discrete transistors. Forty thousand of them are sold in a short time. Then the American giants, starting with HP, begin to catch up.
