Apple × Olivetti

Announced April 18, 1979, at the Salone del Mobile rather than a computer fair, the Lettera II was Olivetti's first home computer and Apple's first product designed outside California. The deal was struck the previous autumn, weeks after Carlo De Benedetti took over at Ivrea and went looking for a way into personal computing faster than Olivetti's own laboratories could manage. Apple supplied the logic board, essentially an Apple II Plus. Olivetti supplied everything a person would touch.

The case was drawn by Mario Bellini's studio, working from the wedge he had just completed for the ET 101 electronic typewriter, with Jerry Manock flying to Milan three times to make sure the Apple board, the eight expansion slots and the power supply still fitted. Ettore Sottsass, still consulting for Olivetti, was brought in for colour only. He rejected Apple's proposed brown, kept Bellini's warm beige for the body and insisted the return key, space bar and lid be moulded in a single saturated orange so that the machine read as one object from across a room.

The keyboard was the point. Olivetti fitted a full-travel mechanism taken from its office typewriter line, with sculpted, cylindrically dished keys and a firm, even stroke that reviewers compared to a Lettera 32 rather than any computer. Olivetti also required a revised character ROM so the machine could display lowercase and Italian accented vowels, something the standard Apple II could not do until the IIe in 1983. Italian units shipped with the QZERTY layout used on Olivetti typewriters; the rest of Europe received QWERTY.

Byte praised the keyboard and called the price hard to defend. Domus gave it a cover. The oddly specific detail collectors cite is the lid: a snap-on orange ABS cover, borrowed in spirit from Sottsass's Valentine, which protected the keys and had a moulded handle, so the Lettera II could be carried from office to home. Inside the lid, Olivetti printed a card holder for the owner's name and address, in case it was left on a train.