1965 · Programmable Magnetic-Card Calculator · Work 926 of 1,871
A design office in Ivrea in Italy on an autumn morning, on a pale desk a low flowing machine of light grey-beige sixty centimetres wide with a softly overhanging front edge, at the back on a grey arm a roll of white paper above a printer behind a plain dark glass strip, in the middle a recessed well with a narrow slot, a hand in a dark suit sleeve sliding a plain salmon-pink card into the slot, keys of cream, khaki and dark slate green, every key plain, smooth and unmarked, at the right a ribbed light strip glowing green and red, a glass wall onto red-brick buildings and yellow trees.
What it was used for
The Olivetti Programma 101 was a programmable desk calculator with a magnetic card. In the transcript of the NASA Johnson Space Center Oral History Project of 16 February 2006 David W. Whittle describes that by Apollo 11 a Olivetti Programma 101 was available - "a desktop computer, sort of, kind of". The lunar module's high-gain antenna did not know where Earth was; the crew had 2 knobs for pitch and yaw and needed angles for them. In Houston 4 separate programs were run on the P101, with trigonometric values looked up by hand from printed tables between the programs, 10 to 15 minutes per round. A second use is recorded in a journal: in 1968 Walkenstein and others described in Analytical Biochemistry the adaptation of the P101 to the automated determination of absolute radioactivity.
What was new
What was new was the magnetic card as storage for program and data outside the machine, 2 programs of up to 120 instructions per card, so that a program did not have to be typed in for every use; the Old Calculator Museum calls the card reader the first ever use of such a device for offline storage in an electronic calculator, although the programmable Mathatron was on the market earlier. The trade press stayed cautious in 1965: Electronics headed its report of 1 November 1965 "Desk-top computer" but wrote that the P101 exhibited 2 of the 3 characteristics separating a general-purpose computer from a desk calculator, lacking the ability to alter its own instructions. Pier Giorgio Perotto replied in the same journal on 24 January 1966 that the machine could indeed alter its own program - while conceding that other machines had been on the scene before.
What the sources leave open: The claim that the P101 computed Apollo 11 trajectories is carried by none of the sources checked; the NASA transcript speaks of antenna angles, Olivetti's archive only generally of the "Apollo 11 mission". IEEE Spectrum gives no number of NASA machines ("a number of"). The machine was presented, per Guarnieri and IEEE Spectrum, at the BEMA show in New York in October 1965, not at a world's fair.
Connections
Every connection names its kind. “Forerunner” on its own would be a claim.