Advertisements of early 80's

Here we find the scan of several Olivetti advertisements from 1982 to 1984.

"Olivetti M20, The Personal Computer of Telematics Age". Telematics means the integrated use of telecommunications and informatics. Probably because of the several RS232 interfaces available, the Olivetti M20 was particularly good in small office networks. The Zilog Z8001 was a real 16bit microprocessor; M20 was a step forward the 8bit machines running CP/M. Taken from MCmicrocomputer. MCmicrocomputer was a glorious Italian magazine dedicated to personal and home computers. Hundreds of Italian hobbyist have copied BASIC listings for the Apple II, Commodore VIC20 and 64, Sinclair Spectrum.

"More questions, more answers", the Olivetti M20ST was tailored to be used in scientific and technical laboratories. Among its features, a complete implementation of a IEEE488 (HP-IB) parallel interface allowed the control of measurement instruments. Taken from MCmicrocomputer.

A variation of the Olivetti M20ST advertisement presented above.

This is a late 1984 advertisement wich shows the complete M10-M20-M24 line, which was supposed to be compatible. In reality, M20 was based on the Zilog Z8001 and the other computers used Intel processor and ran MS-DOS. There were Alternate Processor Cards that allowed the M20 to run MS-DOS and M24 to run PCOS. The disk format differencies made data sharing rather cumbersome between PCOS and MS-DOS. Taken from MCmicrocomputer.

1983 "Brains and Beauty" advertisement, from the Blue Angel site

1983 "Brains and Beauty" advertisement, from an online auction. This version differs from the previous one in the text and is at an higher resolution.

1983 german advertisement

German advertisement; courtesy from the OldComputers site

Courtesy from the OldComputers site

The Olivetti M20 shape was designed by Ettore Sottsass, an eminent Italian architect whose pen often worked for Olivetti. Courtesy from the OldComputers site

The second edition of the Quaderno software can be found here. It's a list of all available software packages published by Olivetti or by other software houses for the Olivetti M20. Courtesy from Carlo and his homepage

Olivetti is a registered trademark of Telecom Italia. This site is not related to Olivetti nor to Telecom Italia. The material presented is meant for personal use only and is shared in a "fair use" spirit. If you own the copyright of some of the stuff presented here and you think it should be removed, please contact the webmaster.