In 1961, a car went off the road and it changed Italy’s fate forever. Almost nobody knows.
A car crash can change the fate of Italy, and we’re not talking about politics or sports. We’re talking about technology, about the future, about an opportunity that could have redrawn the global map of innovation. In 1961, Mario Tchou, an Italian-Chinese engineer raised in Rome and trained in the United States, died in a car accident that has never been fully explained. Just a few months earlier, Adriano Olivetti, the visionary who had put him in charge of Olivetti’s Electronics Division, had also passed away. Two key figures, gone in the span of a single year.
And yet, what they were building in Ivrea wasn’t just ambitious, it was revolutionary. The Elea 9003, launched in 1959, was already the world’s first fully transistorized commercial computer. But in the labs, they were working on something even more groundbreaking: miniaturizing electronics using silicon microchips, integrated circuits capable of packing multiple components onto a single substrate.
In the United States, Kilby and Noyce were reaching the same conclusions, but in Ivrea there was one crucial difference: they weren’t aiming for a lab prototype. They wanted to put it straight into a product. The goal was to create a desk-sized computer for offices and businesses, the seed of what would later be called the personal computer.
If Olivetti and Tchou had lived, Italy would have had a pioneering technology, years ahead of the competition. We could have become the Silicon Valley of Europe. Cupertino could have been in Piedmont. Apple could have been born here.
Instead, in 1964, leaderless and adrift, the Electronics Division was sold to General Electric. Along with it went patents, projects, and know-how that ended up fueling the American computer industry. Many of the engineers trained by Tchou went on to work abroad, contributing to the systems that would define modern computing.
An echo of that genius remained in the Olivetti Programma 101, launched in 1965, the first personal computer in history. But by then, the primacy was gone.
All because of a car crash on an Italian road. A single instant that erased the greatest chance we ever had to write the future instead of buying it from someone else.
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Marco Camisani Calzolari
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