On 21 April 1965 it reopens, at Corona Park in Flushing Meadow, the World Fair in New York. It was a strange eventconceived over two years, to tell the future that seemed fantastic at the time, with the beginning of the space age.
The first year the fair had been open for 6 monthsthere had been a winter break, and there were six more planned in 1965. The chronicles say that the day of the inauguration was sunny and a large crowd of onlookers.
That World Fair was also the occasion for the official presentation of the P101, the 101 Program that an Olivetti team led by Pier Giorgio Perotto had built in an almost clandestine way while the company, after the death of Adriano Olivetti, was heading towards a rapid decline. That story demonstrated it in a sensational way: Olivetti officially bet everything on the usual mechanical calculators that had made the fortune of the Ivrea-based company, while a small group of visionaries he created, against all, what will later be called “the first personal computer”.
What happened in New York he told the same Pier Giorgio Perotto in a book many years later: “The decision to present the machine at the 1965 New York Fair had the beneficial effect of legitimizing our work within the Olivetti and making it easier for us to obtain more resources to complete the development … to do was still a lot … The computer was universal, but its practical efficiency in solving concrete problems had to be demonstrated … In 1965 the very idea of personal processing toolwith program, magnetic support for the input and output of data and instructions, totally self-sufficient, to be placed on the desk of any employee in an office … For the Fair, however, in addition to setting up a certain number of prototypes, we thought it appropriate to prepare ad hoc programs, some very serious, for example civil engineering calculations or design of electrical circuits, others less so, like some games with which visitors could play with the machine … The fair was immense, at it was attended by all the world‘s largest producers, both of large electronic computers, IBM in the lead, both of office machines. Olivetti had done things with great fanfare, with a semicircular stand, similar to a large stage, on which the new mechanical flag products, the Logos 27 calculators were placed on platforms … reserved, on the back wall of the stand, a Perottina had been placed, for which the trade name Programma 101 was adopted for the occasion … At the opening of the exhibition, an unexpected and shocking event occurred. As soon as the audience became aware of Program 101 and realized its performance, it began to crowd into the room, eager to put your hands on the keyboard, to have information on when the product would be available, on its price. At first the reactions were almost one of distrust: some asked if by chance the machine was powered by some large computer hidden in the wall. Then the distrust turned into amazement, finally into enthusiasm “.
But it was not enough to wake up the cold managers who had taken control of Olivetti.