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About four months ago I quit my job at Doublepoint and de­cided to start my own thing.

I’d been work­ing on a lit­tle pro­ject with Pedrique (who would be­come my co-founder) for a bit over half-a-year and de­cided I had enough sig­nal to de­ter­mine he was some­one I wanted to start a busi­ness with.

I was ex­cited about the idea we were work­ing on at the time (we were live with pay­ing cus­tomers and truly be­lieved in the the­sis), but in hind­sight, be­ing truly hon­est about my mo­ti­va­tions, I mostly wanted to run my own thing. In a dream world I’d have had the “idea of my life” while work­ing at PostHog or Doublepoint and have gone on to build that with max­i­mum con­vic­tion but this was­n’t the case, so I got tired of wait­ing for a spark and de­cided to go out and make it hap­pen, with the idea we were work­ing on be­ing our best bet at the time.

Since I’d just quit my job, I had my fi­nances well in or­der. Thus, my ideal sce­nario would have been to keep work­ing on the prod­uct we had, try to scale it, and if that did­n’t work, try some­thing else, then some­thing else, un­til some­thing did in­deed re­ally get off the ground, and only at that point we would con­sider whether or not to raise VC fund­ing, de­pend­ing on whether it made sense or not.

My ideal sce­nario was­n’t go­ing to work for Pedrique, though. He had told me for a while that the money he had saved up for try­ing to build his own thing was run­ning out and that soon he’d need to start free­lanc­ing or some­thing to make some in­come in or­der to sus­tain the search for a lit­tle longer. Prior to us work­ing to­gether, he had a bit of suc­cess with his MicroSaaS prod­ucts but only just enough to in­crease his per­sonal run­way, which was now rea­son­ably short.

We had spo­ken about this be­fore, but with me now be­ing 110% in, we had to do some­thing about it. I had just come in full-time so we weren’t about to go back to a dy­namic where one per­son was full-time and the other part-time be­cause they needed to make ends meet. The de­ci­sion then be­came clear: we’re gonna raise.

At that point, it was an easy de­ci­sion to make. Again, we have two co-founders who have a lot of con­fi­dence in each other, and we don’t want to let the op­por­tu­nity pass us by. So while this was­n’t my ideal choice, we were a busi­ness now and this was the best de­ci­sion for the com­pany. “Just don’t die” goes the ad­vice I think, and Skald had just then been born.

And so raise we did. We brought in four phe­nom­e­nal an­gels, in­clud­ing, and this is rel­e­vant, my last few bosses (PostHog co-founders James and Tim and Doublepoint co-founder Ohto), and then de­cided to look for an early-stage fund. We even­tu­ally landed with Broom Ventures and passed up on a few other op­por­tu­ni­ties to limit di­lu­tion.

Great, right? I did­n’t need a salary yet, but for equal­ity pur­poses, I now had one. Our in­vestors are amaz­ing. James and Ohto have been par­tic­u­larly help­ful as an­gels (thank you!), and our in­vestors are all founders of suc­cess­ful com­pa­nies, in­clud­ing Jeff and Dan, the Broom GPs. We’re su­per early, but Broom has been mas­sively help­ful and all-around just a great hands-off VC to deal with.

Most im­por­tantly, none of them put any pres­sure on us. All un­der­stand the na­ture of pre-seed in­vest­ing well, and that can’t be said about all the po­ten­tial in­vestors we took meet­ings with.

So some time passes and we de­cide to pivot. We’re re­ally ex­cited about the new idea. We launch and get a bit of early trac­tion. The open source pro­ject is do­ing well, but we’re strug­gling to mon­e­tize. We fail to close a few cus­tomers and the trac­tion wanes a bit.

Then I find my­self fucked in the head.

And here’s where we get to the point that I’m not sure I should be talk­ing pub­licly about. Does this hurt my im­age a bit? Maybe. Do I look like I’m not cut for this? Potentially. But I’ve al­ways ap­pre­ci­ated when peo­ple share about the process rather than just talk­ing about things in hind­sight, and re­flect­ing while things are hap­pen­ing + be­ing su­per trans­par­ent pub­licly is how I am. You’re wit­ness­ing my growth, live, as I type these words.

Anyway, so what hap­pened is I found my­self spend­ing days with my head spin­ning, search­ing for ideas. I’m an­gry, I’m an­noyed, and I’m not be­ing su­per pro­duc­tive.

As I dug deeper into these feel­ings, I re­al­ized I was feel­ing pres­sured. We weren’t mak­ing that much money, we weren’t grow­ing su­per fast. Then you look around and see “startup X gets to $1M ARR a month af­ter launch” and shit like that and I’m feel­ing ter­ri­ble about how we’re barely grow­ing. I’m think­ing peo­ple that I re­ally re­spect and ad­mire have placed a bet on me and I’m let­ting them down.

Except they’re not say­ing this, I am.

There’s an in­ter­est­ing re­flec­tion that came up in a dis­cus­sion be­tween me and my girl­friend a few months prior that I re­al­ized ap­plied to me, but in re­verse. It’s much more com­fort­able to be the per­son that “could be X” than to be the per­son that tries to ac­tu­ally do it. We were speak­ing about this re­gard­ing peo­ple who have a clear in­nate tal­ent for some­thing like mu­sic or sports but don’t prac­tice at all. Everyone says things like “you’d be the best at this if you just prac­ticed more” but then they never do.

The thing is: it’s a lot eas­ier to live your life think­ing you could have done X if you wanted to, than to “disappoint” these peo­ple that be­lieved in you by try­ing and fail­ing. You can al­ways lean on this idea in your head of what you could have been, and how every­one be­lieved in you so it must be true, but you just chose not to fol­low that path.

In my case, I found my­self on the other side of that coin. Throughout my ca­reer, I’ve al­ways had re­ally high own­er­ship roles, and have been ac­tively in­volved in a cou­ple 0 to 1 jour­neys. This led me through­out my ca­reer to get many com­ments about how great of a founder I’d be or how I have the “founder pro­file”. I led teams, I wore a bunch of dif­fer­ent hats, I worked hard as fuck, and I al­ways thought about the big pic­ture.

Those traits led my for­mer bosses to then in­vest in me, and now sud­denly I have to, in my head, live up to all of this. I can no longer take so­lace in some ex­cuse like “I could have been a founder but work­ing full-time was the best fi­nan­cial de­ci­sion (it al­most al­ways is) so I never started my own thing”. I set foot down a path from which there’s no re­turn. I’ve be­gun my at­tempt. I can of course stop and try again later. But from now on, I’m ei­ther gonna be a suc­cess­ful founder, or I’m not. And if I’m not, I’ll have to deal with hav­ing bro­ken with the ex­pec­ta­tions that peo­ple had of me.

There’s a lot to un­pack here, in­clud­ing what “success” means, and how most of what I say are other peo­ple’s ex­pec­ta­tions are ac­tu­ally my own pro­jected onto them (I’ve learned this about my re­la­tion­ship with my fa­ther too), but this post is al­ready a bit too long so I’ll save those for an­other time.

But the whole point here is not just that hav­ing raised this money from friends my head got a bit messy, but that I started to ac­tu­ally op­er­ate in a way that is coun­ter­pro­duc­tive for my startup, while think­ing I was ac­tu­ally do­ing what was best.

Ideas we con­sid­ered when piv­ot­ing were looked more through a lens of “how big does this feel” rather than “what prob­lem does this solve and for who”. The slow growth was eat­ing me, and while slow growth is ter­ri­ble and can be a sign that you’re on the wrong path it needs to be looked at from an ob­jec­tively strate­gic lens. Didn’t we say we were go­ing to build an open source com­mu­nity and only later fo­cus on mon­e­ti­za­tion? Is that a vi­able strat­egy? Do we ac­tu­ally have a sound plan? Those were the things I should have been think­ing about, rather than loop­ing on “we need some­thing that grows faster”.

The peo­ple who in­vested in us, in­vested in us, not what­ever idea we pitched them. And the best thing we can do is to fol­low our own process for build­ing a great busi­ness based on what we be­lieve and know, rather than fo­cus­ing on mak­ing num­bers look good so I can feel more re­lieved the next time I send over an in­vestor up­date.

We have a ton to learn, par­tic­u­larly about sales (since we’re both en­gi­neers), so we can’t just be build­ing shit for the sake of build­ing shit be­cause that’s our com­fort zone. But if our process is slower than com­pany X on TechCrunch, that’s fine. It’s a marathon af­ter all.

So af­ter prob­a­bly break­ing many rules about what a founder should talk about pub­licly, what was my whole goal here? I mean, the main thing for me with posts like this is to get things off my chest. I’ve al­ways said that the rea­son I pub­lish writ­ing that in­cludes po­ems about my breakup, sto­ries about falling in love, posts about my in­se­cu­ri­ties, and re­flec­tions about my dreams is that by there be­ing the pos­si­bil­ity of some­one read­ing them (because tech­ni­cally it could be the case that no­body does) I can truly be who I re­ally am in my day-to-day life. If I’m ok with there be­ing the pos­si­bil­ity of a friend I’ll meet later to­day hav­ing read about how I felt dur­ing my last breakup, I can be my­self with them with­out reser­va­tions, be­cause I’ve made my­self avail­able to be seen. That’s al­ways been re­ally free­ing to me.

As a side ef­fect, I’d hope that if this does get read by some peo­ple, par­tic­u­larly those start­ing or look­ing to start a busi­ness, that they can re­flect about them­selves, their lives, and their com­pa­nies through lis­ten­ing to my story. I thought about writ­ing a short bul­let list about lessons I learned from rais­ing money and deal­ing with its af­ter­math here, but hon­estly, that’s best left to the reader to fig­ure out. We’re all dif­fer­ent, and how one per­son re­acts to a set of cir­cum­stances will dif­fer from some­one else. Some peo­ple don’t feel pres­sure at all, or at least not from friends or in­vestors. Or they only re­spond pos­i­tively to pres­sure (because it cer­tainly has ben­e­fits too). Maybe they’re bet­ter off than me. Maybe they’re not.

This is my story, af­ter all. I wish you the best of luck with yours.

P. S. I’m do­ing good now. I’m mo­ti­vated and sharp. If some­one finds them­selves in a sim­i­lar sit­u­a­tion, feel free to shoot me an email if you’re keen to talk. Happy to go over what was use­ful for me, which fell out­side of the scope of this post.

Kip (meaning “grammatical mood” in Turkish) is an ex­per­i­men­tal pro­gram­ming lan­guage that uses Turkish gram­mat­i­cal cases as part of its type sys­tem. It demon­strates how nat­ural lan­guage mor­phol­ogy—specif­i­cally Turkish noun cases and vowel har­mony—can be in­te­grated into pro­gram­ming lan­guage de­sign.

This is a re­search/​ed­u­ca­tional pro­ject ex­plor­ing the in­ter­sec­tion of lin­guis­tics and type the­ory, not a pro­duc­tion pro­gram­ming lan­guage.

There is also a tu­to­r­ial in Turkish and a tu­to­r­ial in English that ex­plains how to write Kip pro­grams.

For you to get a taste of what Kip looks like, here is an ex­am­ple pro­gram that prompts the user to en­ter a num­ber and then prints that many of the Fibonacci num­bers:

Kip uses Turkish noun cases (ismin hal­leri) to de­ter­mine ar­gu­ment re­la­tion­ships in func­tion calls:

Because Turkish cases mark gram­mat­i­cal re­la­tion­ships ex­plic­itly, Kip al­lows flex­i­ble ar­gu­ment or­der­ing. These two calls are equiv­a­lent:

As long as ar­gu­ments have dif­fer­ent case suf­fixes or dif­fer­ent types, Kip can de­ter­mine which ar­gu­ment is which.

Sequencing with -ip/-ıp/-up/-üp suf­fixes and bind­ing with olarak:

# Quick in­stall (macOS/Linux)

chmod +x in­stall.sh

./install.sh

# Or man­ual build

stack build

The TRmorph trans­ducer is bun­dled at ven­dor/​tr­morph.fst.

# Start REPL

stack exec kip

# Execute a file

stack exec kip — –exec path/​to/​file.kip

# Install to PATH

stack in­stall

A browser play­ground build is avail­able un­der play­ground/. It com­piles the non-in­ter­ac­tive run­ner (kip-playground) to was­m32-wasi and ships a small HTML/JS har­ness that runs Kip in the browser.

See play­ground/​README.md for pre­req­ui­sites, tool­chain setup, and build steps.

Kip stores a cached, type-checked ver­sion of each .kip file in a sib­ling .iz file. When you run a file again, Kip will reuse the .iz cache if both the source and its loaded de­pen­den­cies are un­changed.

If you want to force a fresh parse and type-check, delete the .iz file next to the source.

stack test

Tests are in tests/​suc­ceed/ (expected to pass) and tests/​fail/ (expected to fail).

Kip uses TRmorph for Turkish mor­pho­log­i­cal analy­sis. When a word has mul­ti­ple pos­si­ble parses (e.g., “takası” could be “taka + pos­ses­sive” or “takas + ac­cusative”), Kip car­ries all can­di­dates through pars­ing and re­solves am­bi­gu­ity dur­ing type check­ing.

For in­ten­tion­ally am­bigu­ous words, use an apos­tro­phe to force a spe­cific parse: taka’sı vs takas’ı.

The town of Ivrea is quite old and has a rich his­tory, but to­day, its pop­u­la­tion has shrunk from around 90,000 in 1970 to just over 20,000 in the 2020s. In the 1400s, Ivrea gained small Jewish com­mu­nity. By the mid 1800s, Salvador Benedetto Olivetti was a suc­cess­ful tex­tile mer­chant in that com­mu­nity, and he mar­ried Elvira Sacerdoti, a bank­ing heiress from Modena. Salvador and Elvira had Samuel David Camillo Olivetti on the 13th of August in 1868. Tragically, Salvador passed away when Camillo was just a year old. Camillo, whether the re­sult of his fa­ther’s death or just his wiring, had a rather soli­tary na­ture. He was im­petu­ous, re­bel­lious, non­con­formist, and prone to rather sud­den out­bursts. By all ac­counts, Elvira did well by her chil­dren, Camillo and Emma. They were taught mul­ti­ple lan­guages, versed in cul­ture and pol­i­tics, and they were taught to be open-minded. Camillo at­tended Calchi-Taeggi College in Milan (a board­ing school) and then went on to the Royal Industrial Museum (Polytechnic University of Turin to­day).

Royal Industrial was the first school of its kind in Italy, a school of elec­tri­cal en­gi­neer­ing. Among the promi­nent minds there was Galileo Ferraris who’d in­de­pen­dently de­vel­oped AC power, in­vented the in­duc­tion mo­tor, and taught Olivetti. Olivetti grad­u­ated in 1891, and he went to work at a man­u­fac­tur­ing firm in London that pro­duced tools for elec­tri­cal mea­sure­ment. This was a short lived en­deavor, and Olivetti re­turned to Turin to work for Ferraris. In 1893, Olivetti ac­com­pa­nied Ferraris to the Chicago Electricity Congress and the World’s Columbian Exposition. The two then made their way to West Orange Laboratories in Llewellyn Park, New Jersey to visit Tomas Edison. Olivetti had a pos­i­tive view of Edison, but he noted that Edison and Ferraris had a dif­fi­cult time con­vers­ing. Ferraris did­n’t speak much English, and Edison was hard of hear­ing. Due to these bar­ri­ers, Olivetti had to trans­late for Ferraris… rather loudly.

Ferraris left the United States to re­turn to Italy, but Olivetti chose to con­tinue his ad­ven­ture. He vis­ited Pittsburgh, Albany, Boston, New York, Salt Lake, and San Francisco. It was the Bay Area that oc­cu­pied the ma­jor­ity of his time in the USA from what I can tell. He served as an as­sis­tant elec­tri­cal en­gi­neer at Stanford from November of 1893 to April of 1894, and he was able to con­duct var­i­ous ex­per­i­ments into the us­age and ap­pli­ca­tion of elec­tric­ity.

Olivetti viewed both the British and the American in­dus­trial and eco­nomic en­vi­ron­ments fa­vor­ably, and when he re­turned to Italy, he sought to build. His first en­ter­prise was to rep­re­sent the Victor bi­cy­cle and Williams type­writer com­pa­nies in Italy. This did­n’t last long. Then with his class­mates Dino Gatta and Michele Ferrero, he opened a fac­tory that pro­duced elec­tric me­ter­ing equip­ment This com­pany and fac­tory re­lo­cated to Milan in 1904. While this had some suc­cess, it was­n’t ful­fill­ing for Olivetti.

In 1899, Camillo Olivetti met Luisa Revel. Revel was the daugh­ter of a pas­tor, and she was rather shy. The two were as op­po­site as one could imag­ine, but they fell in love and mar­ried. They had six chil­dren: Elena (1900), Adriano (1901), Massimo (1902), Silvia (1904), Lalla (1907), and Dino (1912). The chil­dren were home schooled for much of their pri­mary ed­u­ca­tions, and Olivetti wanted them to play and en­joy the sun in their youths as much as pos­si­ble.

On the 29th of October in 1908, Camillo Olivetti reg­is­tered Ingegneria Camillo Olivetti & Compagnia with the Notary. The ini­tial fund­ing was 350,000 lire (about 2.9 mil­lion USD in 2025 dol­lars) with Olivetti hold­ing a ma­jor­ity of the com­pany and 13 part­ners hav­ing smaller stakes. With the first fac­tory for his new type­writer com­pany be­ing built, Olivetti wanted a home nearby. He pur­chased the Convento di San Bernardino which then be­came Casa Olivetti. The set­ting of a for­mer con­vent is fit­ting. Whether a re­sult of his per­sonal and po­lit­i­cal be­liefs, his wife’s in­flu­ence, di­vine rev­e­la­tion, or some com­bi­na­tion of these el­e­ments, Olivetti con­verted to Unitarianism. I imag­ine that in par­tic­u­lar, the Unitarian faith’s strict monothe­ism would have been fa­mil­iar to him hav­ing been raised in Judaism, and the Unitarian em­pha­sis on rea­son, sci­ence, and phi­los­o­phy would have been at­trac­tive to him as an en­gi­neer.

Over the course of six months in what was for­merly the chapel and now his pri­vate study, Olivetti de­vel­oped the pro­to­type of his first type­writer. Of course, Olivetti did­n’t in­tend to be sec­ond-rate. He took an­other trip to the USA to fa­mil­iar­ize him­self with the best prac­tices for type­writer pro­duc­tion (particularly at Remington, af­ter ac­qui­si­tion that com­pany be­came Remington Rand), and he re­turned to Ivrea in late 1909 or early 1910 with Brown and Sharpe au­to­matic lathes and milling ma­chines. His first four em­ploy­ees were Valentino Prelle, Giuseppe Trompetto, Pietro Bronzini and Stefano Pretti. At the World’s Fair in 1911 (April through November) in Turin, the M1 was dis­played to the pub­lic for the first time. Also on dis­play were the ma­chine tools used in the pro­duc­tion of the type­writ­ers, and it was some­what clear that Olivetti was as proud (if not more so) of his pro­duc­tion meth­ods as he was his prod­ucts. The fair’s cat­a­logue stated that Olivetti was the first and only type­writer fac­tory in Italy, and of the M1 it men­tioned that the prod­uct was first class, patented in sev­eral coun­tries, of an orig­i­nal de­sign, pro­duc­ing leg­i­ble char­ac­ters with a stan­dard key­board, a two-color rib­bon, a dec­i­mal tab­u­la­tor, back-space, and mar­gin ad­just­ment.

The first large or­der for Olivetti ma­chines came shortly af­ter the Fair with the Italian Navy or­der­ing 100. This was fol­lowed by an­other siz­able or­der in 1912 from the Italian postal ser­vice. The M1 was usu­ally sold for 550 lire and around 6000 were pro­duced. It was a com­pli­cated ma­chine with around 3000 parts, all of which were hand­made. The com­pleted type­writer weighed around 37 pounds, had 42 keys, 84 signs. Every de­scrip­tion of this ma­chine notes that the M1 was ex­cep­tional with rapid op­er­a­tion, high qual­ity con­struc­tion, and great re­li­a­bil­ity.

As I have been un­able to find the ex­act date on which that price was set, as­cer­tain­ing the rel­a­tive price of the M1 to­day is dif­fi­cult. If I as­sume that this price was set in 1911, the to­tal price in 2025 dol­lars would be some­thing like $3885.32. I can­not imag­ine many or­ders at such a price. Yet, this same price of 550 lire would equate to some­thing around $1200 in 1918. One in­ter­est­ing anec­dote was that the M1 was about 100 lire more than a Remington. So, this would place the price of the M1 around $1670 in 1912 ad­justed to 2025 dol­lars.

In run­ning his com­pany, Camillo Olivetti was a gen­er­ous and fa­mil­iar man. He im­ple­mented a short­ened work week, hu­mane fac­tory con­di­tions, high wages, nine and a half months of paid ma­ter­nity leave, child care, fam­ily wel­fare, work­er’s hous­ing, recre­ation fa­cil­i­ties, ed­u­ca­tional ser­vices, and profit shar­ing. He did­n’t sep­a­rate him­self from the work­ers in his fac­to­ries, and he main­tained friend­ships with many of them. This ca­ma­raderie led to many de­ci­sions be­ing made as a group rather than be­ing made top-down. As for his view of the com­pa­ny’s pro­duc­tion, he em­braced a pol­icy of ver­ti­cal in­te­gra­tion. Product de­sign, re­search, man­u­fac­tur­ing, and sales were done in-house. The parts for every prod­uct were like­wise pro­duced by the com­pany it­self. With a de­mand for ex­tremely high qual­ity and su­pe­rior en­gi­neer­ing, work­ers would be ed­u­cated and trained at Olivetti if they lacked ad­e­quate ex­pe­ri­ence. All of this made Olivetti an at­trac­tive place to work, and the com­pany grew from 20 em­ploy­ees in 1911 to 110 em­ploy­ees by 1913. Those 110 em­ploy­ees could pro­duce 23 to 28 type­writ­ers each week.

The years 1915 through 1918 were rough on the com­pany with Europe at war. The work week was re­duced to 30 hours, work­ers of­ten had to de­fer wages to keep the com­pany run­ning, and the fac­tory was con­verted for wartime needs. At the end of the Great War, the Olivetti com­pany took ad­van­tage of some of its re­cent fac­tory mod­i­fi­ca­tions to ex­pand into the of­fice sup­plies busi­ness be­com­ing an Italian equiv­a­lent of Remington, a ma­jor dis­tinc­tion be­ing that Olivetti’s prod­ucts were in­tended to be not only of high qual­ity, but things of beauty. From the minds of de­signer Marcello Nizzoli, cal­lig­ra­pher Giovanni Mardersteig, and artists Luigi Munari, Ettore Sottsass, Luigi Veronesi, and Gianni Pintori came prod­ucts that were every bit as vi­su­ally stun­ning as they were me­chan­i­cally sound.

The M20 was un­veiled at the Brussels Exhibition of 1920. Compared to its pre­de­ces­sor, the M20 was phys­i­cally smaller, lighter, and had a fixed car­riage. It was also in­cred­i­bly suc­cess­ful. Four years af­ter in­tro­duc­tion, the com­pa­ny’s Ivrea fac­tory had 400 work­ers pro­duc­ing 4000 units per an­num. By 1926, this in­creased to 500 work­ers and 8000 units per an­num, then to 13,000 per an­num by the end of 1929. The de­sign of the M20 was­n’t com­pletely sta­tic, and it re­ceived up­dates through­out the 1920s.

On the 22nd of January in 1929, Olivetti’s first in­ter­na­tional ex­pan­sion was es­tab­lished with the Hispano Olivetti Company.

The Olivetti fam­ily were mildly so­cial­ist in their po­lit­i­cal at­ti­tudes, and while Camillo may have con­verted to Unitarianism, his wife and chil­dren re­mained Waldensian Christians in keep­ing with their up­bring­ing. In 1922, the National Fascist Party had gained con­trol of the Kingdom of Italy. Camillo Olivetti’s son, Adriano, grad­u­ated from Polytechnic University of Turin in 1924. Adriano was op­posed to fas­cism, and he aided in the es­cape of sev­eral po­lit­i­cal pris­on­ers in­clud­ing Filippo Turati, Ferruccio Parri, and Carlo Rosselli dur­ing his first year fol­low­ing uni­ver­sity while work­ing as a tech­ni­cal as­sis­tant in the en­gi­neer­ing group at Olivetti. Like his fa­ther be­fore him, he went to the USA, but un­like his fa­ther, his trip served to get him away from the au­thor­i­ties. That is­n’t to say he did­n’t study in­dus­try while there, be­cause he most cer­tainly did. For the younger Olivetti, the visit was dom­i­nated by Henry Ford’s pro­duc­tion lines, and Remington’s or­ga­ni­za­tional sys­tems. Returning to Italy and to the com­pany, Adriano was pro­moted to the head of me­chan­i­cal de­sign where he was in charge of the prod­uct de­vel­op­ment processes. In early 1929, he was pro­moted to the po­si­tion of tech­ni­cal di­rec­tor. In this po­si­tion, he was the leader of all en­gi­neer­ing and pro­duc­tion op­er­a­tions. That same year, the Concordat of 1929 made Roman Catholicism the sole re­li­gion of Italy. Unsurprisingly, Adriano sud­denly be­came a mem­ber of the party, but we know that this was merely a mat­ter of ap­pear­ances as the fac­tory in Ivrea of­fered food, false iden­ti­ties, and shel­ter for fugi­tives of the regime; ac­tiv­i­ties which con­tin­ued un­til May of 1945.

The Olivetti M40 was re­leased in 1930 re­plac­ing the M20. The M40 had keys re­quir­ing less force to op­er­ate and thus al­lowed a higher typ­ing speed. It main­tained the Olivetti rep­u­ta­tion for qual­ity, had a QZERTY lay­out com­plete with space­bar, two shift keys, one cap­i­tal lock key, back­space, and two keys al­low­ing for the chang­ing of the rib­bon color. The M40 was in pro­duc­tion un­til 1948, saw nu­mer­ous up­dates and re­vi­sions, and sold quite well. The M40 was en­gi­neered by Camillo, and pro­duc­tion was man­aged by Adriano.

Following the suc­cess of the M40, Adriano was pro­moted to the po­si­tion of gen­eral man­ager in which he han­dled the man­age­ment of all day to day ac­tiv­i­ties of the com­pany. That same year, the com­pany re­leased the Modello Portatile 1, or MP1, cre­ate by Gino Martinoli, Adriano Olivetti, Riccardo Levi, Aldo Magnelli, and Adriano Magnelli. This was the com­pa­ny’s first portable type­writer, and it weighed 11.46 pounds. While the M1 and M20 were of­fered in any color you wanted as long as that color was black, the MP1 was far more lively with red, blue, brown, and green as op­tions.

With the com­pany now com­pet­ing in of­fice prod­ucts, type­writ­ers, and mo­bile equip­ment, Olivetti con­tin­ued their in­ter­na­tional ex­pan­sion with of­fices across much of Europe and Latin America. Production tripled from 1933 to 1937, and in 1938, Adriano be­came the pres­i­dent of the com­pany. Naturally, this pro­duc­tion in­crease re­quired more work­ers, and those work­ers needed hous­ing. Adriano then un­der­took ur­ban plan­ning and in­fra­struc­ture de­vel­op­ment in Ivrea cre­at­ing neigh­bor­hoods of three and four story flats with green spaces. These were de­signed by promi­nent and well-known ar­chi­tects. From the 1930s through the 1960s, the Olivetti fam­ily would in­vest roughly 3 bil­lion lire in worker wel­fare in the form of hous­ing, child care, schools, pro­fes­sional train­ing cen­ters, and more. With Olivetti’s pres­ence in the town, Ivrea grew from around 15,000 to more than 30,000 by the late 1950s. That num­ber would triple by the mid-1970s.

During World War II, Adriano’s re­sis­tance to fas­cism grew. On a trip to Switzerland in 1942, he met Allen Dulles who was then the Swiss Director of the US Office of Strategic Services. Adriano be­came agent 660 of the OSS on the 15th of June in 1943. Mussolini was re­moved from power on the 25th of July in 1943 through the ef­forts of Dino Grandi with sup­port from King Victor Emmanuel III. Marshal Pietro Badoglio then be­came the Prime Minister. Adriano was ar­rested and im­pris­oned at Regina Coeli in Rome for con­spir­ing with the en­emy, but Italy was in chaos. This chaos al­lowed him to es­cape, but he was a fugi­tive from the law who was var­i­ously hid­ing and run­ning for around six months. Camillo passed away in December, and it is un­clear if Adriano was able to be pre­sent with his fam­ily. Finally in February of 1944, Adriano reached the safety of Switzerland where he once again made con­tact with Dulles, and he op­er­ated his counter-regime ef­forts from there. Olivetti in Ivrea con­tin­ued to of­fer as­sis­tance to those flee­ing per­se­cu­tion and Adriano sup­plied the al­lies with in­tel­li­gence. In the fight­ing in Italy, re­sis­tance to the regime cost the lives of 24 work­ers at Olivetti’s Ivrea lo­ca­tion, but in the end, the regime was de­feated. As peace ar­rived, Olivetti re­turned to Italy in May of 1945.

Through all of this, Adriano’s views had so­lid­i­fied to be com­pletely against fas­cism, oli­garchic cap­i­tal­ism, and marx­ism. He sought some­thing dif­fer­ent, and this he for­mu­lated as the Community Movement. He be­lieved in a fed­er­al­ism com­prised of ter­ri­to­r­ial units that were both cul­tur­ally ho­mo­ge­neous and eco­nom­i­cally au­tonomous. He be­lieved this to be the only path to­ward unit­ing in­dus­tri­al­iza­tion, hu­man­i­tar­i­an­ism, and par­tic­i­pa­tory democ­racy. Outside of pol­i­tics, his spirit had also moved, and Adriano con­verted to Catholicism in 1949. These changes in his think­ing led him to be­come the mayor of Ivrea and later to hold a seat in the Italian par­lia­ment.

After the war, Olivetti ex­panded into the cal­cu­la­tor mar­ket with Divisumma 14 in 1947. The desk­top elec­tro-me­chan­i­cal cal­cu­la­tor could per­form ad­di­tion, sub­trac­tion, mul­ti­pli­ca­tion, and di­vi­sion and print the re­sults. It was the first print­ing elec­tric cal­cu­la­tor to be ca­pa­ble of all four func­tions and the first to in­clude a neg­a­tive bal­ance func­tion. The Divisumma 14 also of­fered a few con­ve­nience fea­tures. The user could in­put data merely for ref­er­ence in print and not cal­cu­la­tion, a cal­cu­late with­out print op­tion to avoid pol­lut­ing the print with un­nec­es­sary data, and a stop for avoid­ing in­fi­nite loops such as when at­tempt­ing to di­vide by zero. It was of­fered in beige and blue. The in­dus­trial de­sign came from Marcello Nizzoli while the me­chan­i­cal and elec­tri­cal de­sign came from au­to­di­dact Natale Capellaro. Various it­er­a­tions on this de­sign were then pro­duced with fewer fea­tures at lower price points. Other vari­a­tions were cre­ated specif­i­cally for cur­ren­cies. Later re­vi­sions on the de­sign would also add a joy­stick rather than the two slid­ers for cur­sor place­ment. This de­sign was later re­fined with Divisumma mod­els 22, 24, and 26.

While Adriano had fled to Switzerland, things had­n’t been quite as easy for Enrico Fermi. Having be­come a pro­fes­sor in 1926 at the age of just 24, he lacked the claims of vi­tal eco­nomic im­por­tance that had aided the Olivetti fam­ily. In 1938, the Italian racial laws made things dif­fi­cult and dan­ger­ous for his wife, Laura, and sev­eral of mem­bers of his re­search team. This pushed Fermi to the USA where he ar­rived on the 2nd of January in 1939 in New York City. As a well known man, he had of­fers from five uni­ver­si­ties, and he chose Columbia. Fermi’s first lec­ture to the US mil­i­tary about nu­clear en­ergy was given on the 18th of March in 1939, and by August of 1941, he was work­ing with six tons of ura­nium and thirty tons of graphite. Ultimately, Fermi ended up at Los Alamos as as­so­ci­ate di­rec­tor.

In 1949, Enrico Fermi was vis­it­ing Italy, and that visit in­cluded a trip to Olivetti’s fac­tory in Ivrea. Adriano and Fermi dis­cussed sev­eral top­ics, but the most im­por­tant con­ver­sa­tion was one in which Fermi urged Adriano to con­sider build­ing com­put­ers as Fermi felt that the ma­chines would be vi­tal to the fu­ture.

In 1952, Olivetti opened a re­search cen­ter in New Canaan, Connecticut to ob­serve US de­vel­op­ments in com­put­ing (the com­pa­ny’s of­fices in the USA were in New York City). In 1954, Adriano met Mario Tchou Wang Li in New York. Tchou was born in Rome, spoke Italian, Mandarin, and English flu­ently, and earned his bach­e­lor’s de­gree in en­gi­neer­ing from the Catholic University of America in Washington, and then earned his mas­ter’s in nu­clear physics from the Polytechnic School of Brooklyn in 1949. At the time of their meet­ing, Tchou was work­ing as an as­so­ci­ate pro­fes­sor at Columbia. To Adriano, Tchou was pre­cisely the kind of man Olivetti needed. Adriano of­fered him a job, Tchou ac­cepted. In December of 1954, he ar­rived in Pisa.

With Tchou as the head of the Laboratorio di Ricerche Elettroniche at Olivetti, the site of the com­pa­ny’s ef­forts had to be se­lected. The first lo­ca­tion was the Physics Department of the University of Pisa in co­op­er­a­tion with the school’s Centro Studi Calcolatrici Elettroniche. The Olivetti team helped the school com­plete the Calcolatrice Elettronica Pisana in 1957, re­mark­able as the first en­tirely Italian elec­tronic com­puter.

During the build­ing of the uni­ver­si­ty’s com­puter, the Olivetti team moved to a nearby villa, and Tchou be­gan re­cruit­ing the twelve best young minds he could from the school and sur­round­ing area, and one vet­eran of the in­dus­try, the Canadian Martin Friedman who’d worked on mag­netic mem­ory for the Ferranti Mark I. By the end of 1955, the re­search group num­bered about 25. This group im­me­di­ately set out to build the pro­to­type of a com­mer­cial ma­chine, the Macchina Zero also known as the Elaboratore Elettronico Aritmetico 9001, or ELEA 9001. This first ma­chine was a vac­uum tube com­puter, and it was only used in­ter­nally by Olivetti. Similarly, the 9002 came af­ter this aim­ing to re­duce costs and in­crease re­li­a­bil­ity.

Upon com­ple­tion of the 9002, Tchou gath­ered his se­nior re­searchers and told them that this ma­chine sim­ply would­n’t do. Olivetti would launch a fully tran­sis­tor­ized main­frame com­puter. For this, the com­pany al­lied it­self with Fairchild, and launched its own tran­sis­tor com­pany, Società Generale Semiconduttori, in 1957. The two com­pa­nies then code­vel­oped the pla­nar process for in­te­grated cir­cuit man­u­fac­tur­ing. The pro­to­type tran­sis­tor­ized ELEA was com­pleted in late 1958. This be­came the ELEA 9003 which was pre­sented to the President of the Republic Giovanni Gronchi on the 8th of November in 1959. This ma­chine weighed in at about five tons, and it could run 8000 to 10,000 in­struc­tions per sec­ond. It was built with tran­sis­tor-diode logic and core mem­ory. The ELEA 9003 was­n’t built with the con­cept of words (not re­ally any­way). Each mem­ory lo­ca­tion could hold a sin­gle al­phanu­meric char­ac­ter with an in­struc­tion be­ing eight char­ac­ters long. The base mem­ory was thus 20,000 mem­ory lo­ca­tions and could be ex­tended to 160,000 or 20K 8bit in­struc­tions or about 26,666 6bit char­ac­ters. With a cy­cle time of about 10 mi­crosec­onds, the com­put­er’s speed was ap­prox­i­mately 100KHz. Uptime was­n’t great, just shy of 50% per day, typ­i­cally be­ing avail­able only be­tween the lat­ter part of each morn­ing to the early part of the evening. This im­proved over time. The 9003 was ca­pa­ble of lim­ited mul­ti­task­ing with three processes be­ing able to be run si­mul­ta­ne­ously. At the time of in­tro­duc­tion, those pro­grams could be writ­ten only in ma­chine lan­guage. The ma­chine had no dy­namic mem­ory al­lo­ca­tion so each pro­gram was loaded con­tigu­ously and al­ways at the same mem­ory lo­ca­tion. By con­ven­tion, the first 3,000 char­ac­ters were left avail­able for test­ing pro­grams. Over time, Olivetti made an as­sem­bler, Psico, avail­able along with test­ing soft­ware, a mon­i­tor pro­gram, and tape han­dling soft­ware. For I/O, the 9003 of­fered card reader/​punch, tape, printer, and of course, an Olivetti type­writer.

The cab­i­nets of the 9003 were made to be fully ac­ces­si­ble by a hu­man with­out the need for lad­ders stand­ing just shy of five feet high, and the wiring was in over­head con­duits rather than un­der the floor. The con­tents of each cab­i­net were color coded with strips that in­di­cated power, mem­ory, ALU, con­trol unit, and the like, and each was arranged in three parts, open­ing like a book.

Forty 9003s were in­stalled, of­fered via lease be­tween 1959 and 1964. The first 9003 was in­stalled at Marzotto in Valdagno, and the sec­ond was in­stalled at Banca Monte dei Paschi di Siena. This sec­ond ex­am­ple is the only cur­rently known to be com­plete and func­tional, and it was do­nated to the Enrico Fermi Technical Institute in Bibbiena by the bank.

The ELEA 6001 was re­leased in 1961 as a smaller and more af­ford­able com­puter though it was still a main­frame of sev­eral cab­i­nets. This com­puter shipped in two dif­fer­ent ver­sions, one for the sci­ences and one for com­mer­cial use, des­ig­nated by the suf­fix of S or C to the nu­meric des­ig­na­tion. Characters were four bits which led to some com­plex­i­ties when us­ing ma­chine code (various sig­ni­fier bits pre­ced­ing or fol­low­ing a char­ac­ter), and the mem­ory con­fig­u­ra­tions avail­able ranged from 10,000 to 100,000 4bit char­ac­ters of core with 40,000 be­ing the most com­mon. With lit­tle mem­ory on hand and with var­i­ous schemes aimed at ef­fi­cient use, the 6001 was shipped with FORTRAN for sci­en­tific uses, and with Palgo (Algol di­alect) for com­mer­cial uses. This ma­chine sold be­tween 140 and 170 units de­pend­ing upon which source one prefers to trust.

Sadly, Adriano passed away rather sud­denly in February of 1960 from a cere­bral throm­bo­sis while on a train to Switzerland. Tchou died in a car ac­ci­dent on the 9th of November in 1961 on his way from Milan to Ivrea to dis­cuss a new line of com­put­ers built from ICs with man­age­ment. The two had planned to launch their com­put­ers in the United States fol­low­ing Olivetti’s 1959 ac­qui­si­tion of the Underwood type­writer com­pany, but af­ter their deaths, this ex­pan­sion plan was can­celled. Some work­ers, doc­u­men­tar­i­ans, and Adriano’s per­sonal guard al­leged that their deaths were per­pe­trated by CIA (successor to OSS), but this was coun­tered by the Tchou fam­ily who stated there was­n’t any ev­i­dence of foul play.

Robert Olivetti was the el­dest son of Adriano and was born in Turin on the 18th of March in 1928. He was ed­u­cated in busi­ness ad­min­is­tra­tion at Bocconi in Milan, and then at Harvard. He joined the com­pany in 1955, and be­came the di­rec­tor of the elec­tron­ics di­vi­sion in 1959. He be­came CEO in 1962.

By 1960, the re­search group had moved to Milan, and Federico Faggin joined the com­pany in au­tumn of that year. He was tasked with de­sign­ing a small, in­ex­pen­sive, per­sonal com­puter. This ma­chine used 1000 logic gates made out of ger­ma­nium tran­sis­tors, and it used 200 PCBs. I/O was done with a tele­type. The com­puter was com­pleted in 1961.

From 1962 to 1964, Roberto was try­ing to keep the com­puter busi­ness run­ning. The pur­chase of Underwood was a fi­nan­cial bur­den, and the pass­ing of both Adriano and Tchou had left de­vel­op­ment idle. With pres­sure from the US gov­ern­ment via am­bas­sador Clare Boothe Luce to sell Olivetti’s elec­tric di­vi­sion to GE, Roberto turned to the Italian gov­ern­ment for as­sis­tance. The Italian gov­ern­ment did­n’t view com­put­ers as be­ing of any na­tional im­por­tance, and thus a bail out was re­jected. New board mem­bers came in with cash and saved the com­pany, but they fa­vored a sale. Aurelio Peccei be­came CEO in 1964, and the Olivetti elec­tron­ics di­vi­sion was sold to General Electric. This sale did not in­clude the type­writer or cal­cu­la­tor di­vi­sions, and Olivetti re­tained Underwood which be­came Olivetti-Underwood. Over the next few years, this would trans­form from li­a­bil­ity to as­set as it pro­vided Olivetti ac­cess to the US mar­ket with es­tab­lished dis­tri­b­u­tion net­works.

Faggin’s small com­puter was re­fined and adapted by Pier Perotto, Giovanni De Sandre, Gastone Garziera, and Giancarlo Toppi. It be­came a diminu­tive, sim­ple, pro­gram­ma­ble, per­sonal, desk­top com­puter. Given the time, the en­tire sys­tem was built of dis­crete com­po­nents: tran­sis­tors, diodes, re­sis­tors, ca­pac­i­tors. For mem­ory, the ma­chine uti­lized 240 bytes of mag­ne­tostric­tive, metal-wire, acoustic de­lay lines with a cy­cle time of 2.2 mil­lisec­onds. All of these com­po­nents were then mounted on phe­no­lic resin (commonly known as Bakelite) cards. Phenolic resin a was cheap, heat-re­sis­tant, non­con­duc­tive, syn­thetic plas­tic first patented in 1907. It was easy to mold and could be pro­duced quite quickly. The ma­jor down­sides were swelling un­der ex­treme hu­mid­ity, dif­fi­culty in re­cy­cling, and tox­i­c­ity. The ma­te­r­ial ceased be­ing used with ar­rival of ABS and PVC.

The only is­sue that re­mained for the small team was that this was a com­puter. Computers were strictly go­ing to be the do­main of GE and not of Olivetti. Given that this ma­chine barely qual­i­fied as a com­puter, Garziera spent sev­eral nights go­ing through all doc­u­men­ta­tion and ref­er­ences to this prod­uct chang­ing the de­scrip­tion from com­puter to cal­cu­la­tor. Olivetti was there­fore able to keep it. Still, GE now owned the build­ing and every­thing in that build­ing ex­cept for the of­fice in use by this team. The re­sult of this close and un­com­fort­able prox­im­ity was that the four painted the win­dows on their of­fice so that GE staff weren’t able to see their ac­tiv­ity.

Depending en­tirely on how loosely the de­f­i­n­i­tion of com­puter is used, the Programma 101 was ei­ther a pro­gram­ma­ble cal­cu­la­tor or the first per­sonal com­puter upon its re­lease in 1965. Of course, just view­ing the key­board, the de­vice ap­pears to be a cal­cu­la­tor rather than a com­puter, but this was also true of the KIM-1. The real lim­i­ta­tion was in mem­ory where a pro­gram of any com­plex­ity was nearly im­pos­si­ble.

The key­board of the P101 was 37 keys, a dec­i­mal se­lec­tor wheel of 0 to 15, and three switches for Program Record, Print Program, and Keyboard re­lease. Input was achieved ei­ther through the key­board or through mag­netic cards, and out­put was achieved pri­mar­ily through the printer. The “display” such as it was con­sisted only of two lamps. Solid blue in­di­cated that the ma­chine was ready for in­put, flash­ing blue in­di­cated that a pro­gram was run­ning, and a red lamp in­di­cated an er­ror. The printer was ca­pa­ble of 30 char­ac­ters per sec­ond.

For all this talk of the ma­chine be­ing a com­puter, I did say that pro­grams of any com­plex­ity were nearly im­pos­si­ble. Well, nearly im­pos­si­ble means that a thing ac­tu­ally is pos­si­ble. A clever pro­gram­mer could split a pro­gram across mul­ti­ple mag­netic cards and feed them se­quen­tially as each part of a pro­gram was run. While this would have been slow, it was pos­si­ble. Given that this sixty pound, type­writer-sized com­puter cost $3200 in 1965 which would be around $38,211 in 2025 dol­lars, some­one need­ing a com­puter with­out req­ui­site funds for a larger ma­chine would find this in­con­ve­nience ac­cept­able. We know this, of course, from sales.

The to­tal ini­tial pro­duc­tion run of the Programma 101 was 44,000 units. The pub­lic un­veil­ing of this “calculator” was at the World’s Fair in New York City dur­ing the Fair’s sec­ond sea­son in 1965. The in­tended star of Olivetti’s show­ing was the Logos 27, an­other of their me­chan­i­cal cal­cu­la­tors. The P101 was in a small back­room, and Olivetti’s man­age­ment had­n’t re­ally thought it’d re­ceive much at­ten­tion. The pre­sen­ter of the P101 in­formed the au­di­ence that he’d be cal­cu­lat­ing the or­bit of a satel­lite, put the card in the ma­chine, and af­ter a few sec­onds the com­puter be­gan print­ing the re­sult. There was quite a bit of ex­cite­ment. The P101 was moved to the front of the booth. Fair at­ten­dees as­sumed that there must be hid­den wires con­nect­ing it to a main­frame off­site, and thus the Olivetti rep­re­sen­ta­tives be­gan al­low­ing peo­ple a closer look. Following the fair, Olivetti sold 40,000 units in the USA alone. Some of these went to NASA where the hum­ble lit­tle ma­chines were used for Apollo 11, as David W. Whittle re­calls:

By Apollo 11, we had a desk­top com­puter, sort of, kind of, called an Olivetti Programma 101. It was kind of a su­per­cal­cu­la­tor. It was prob­a­bly a foot and a half square, and about maybe eight inches tall. It would add, sub­tract, mul­ti­ply, and di­vide, but it would re­mem­ber a se­quence of these things, and it would record that se­quence on a mag­netic card, a mag­netic strip that was about a foot long and two inches wide. So you could write a se­quence, a pro­gram­ming se­quence, and load it in there, and then if you would—the Lunar Module high-gain an­tenna was not very smart. It did­n’t know where Earth was. So you would have to call up and give the as­tro­nauts some—we had two knobs, a pitch and yaw knob, but you have to give him some an­gles to put it at. Then once the an­tenna found the Earth’s sig­nal, it would track it, and then you did­n’t have to worry. But it had to get within a cer­tain range be­fore it would grab it and track it. We would have to run four sep­a­rate pro­grams on this Programma 101, and then in be­tween those pro­grams, we’d have to get out our man­u­als. I don’t know if you know what a CRC [Standard Mathematical Tables and Formulae] Manual is, but we’d have to look up trigono­met­ric func­tions and in­put the data, which to­day your cal­cu­la­tor does that. So what was tak­ing us ten or fif­teen min­utes to do, to­day I could do on my hand cal­cu­la­tor in ten sec­onds. Then we would read out the an­gles that we came up with to the crew, and they would dial them in, look at the sig­nal strength, the sig­nal strength there. They’d go to auto track, and then they could track it. It was a lot of de­tail stuff like that. I don’t re­mem­ber any, not just in my sys­tems but other sys­tems, any­thing that was sig­nif­i­cant.

The com­pa­ny’s for­tunes im­proved, and Peccei left the com­pany in 1967. Roberto Olivetti then re­turned as CEO un­til 1971. After 1971, he re­mained as the VP and chair­man. Between 1965 and 1971, the Programma 101 rep­re­sented around 24% of Olivetti’s global rev­enues with that sin­gle prod­uct bring­ing in at least $140,800,000. Perotto and his team, with the sup­port of Roberto, likely saved Olivetti.

The P101 was fol­lowed by the P602 in 1971, and it was the first Olivetti com­puter to be mar­keted as a mi­cro­com­puter. It used the same ar­chi­tec­ture as the P101, but used DTL ICs in­stead of dis­crete com­po­nents. It re­tained the use of de­lay line mem­ory but dou­bled the size. One ma­jor ad­di­tion was the sys­tem ROM which added trigono­met­ric, log­a­rith­mic, and ex­po­nen­tial func­tions. A sec­ond ad­di­tion was an in­ter­face for mag­netic rib­bon mem­ory car­tridges hold­ing 56, 112, or 224 blocks where a block was equiv­a­lent to four lines of a mag­netic card. Finally, the P602 added the IPSO in­ter­face (Olivetti Standard Peripheral Interface) al­low­ing the con­nec­tion of tape read­ers, punches, plot­ters, type­writ­ers, hard disks, and other pe­riph­er­als. This was fol­lowed by the P652 which in­creased mem­ory to 4K and could be ex­panded to 32K. It also in­cluded an in­te­grated mag­netic card that could store 192K.

The Divisumma 18 was re­leased in 1972 and was the de­sign of Mario Bellini. This cal­cu­la­tor lacked a dis­play and printed all re­sults. The main cal­cu­la­tor and printer body was 9.75 inches by 4.75 inches by 2 inches, and af­ter at­tach­ing the bat­tery pack, that length was in­creased to 12.1 inches. While this prod­uct did­n’t bring in tons of rev­enue, and it was­n’t all too im­por­tant in the his­tory of com­put­ing, its de­sign is so wild that I had to men­tion it.

Olivetti re­leased the TC 800 ter­mi­nal in 1974. This used a two-card Olivetti de­signed proces­sor and ran the Cosmos op­er­at­ing sys­tem. It was fol­lowed by the TC 1800 in 1977. Perotto did­n’t re­ally seem to want to make ter­mi­nals, so the same CPU and other in­ter­nals made their way into the P6060 in 1975. The first and most ob­vi­ous dif­fer­ence is the key­board, which is fi­nally a full QWERTY key­board with a 10-key and some ex­tra keys for spe­cific func­tions. RAM is 48K with 16K avail­able to the user and an ac­cess time of 700ns. The ROM loader is made of bipo­lar LSI cir­cuits and once loaded into RAM oc­cu­pies the other 32K. Total RAM could be ex­panded to al­low up to 48K of user-avail­able RAM. The printer is now larger, and the sys­tem in­cluded a plasma dis­play ca­pa­ble of dis­play­ing a sin­gle line of 32 char­ac­ters (upper and lower case char­ac­ters as well as sym­bols). That line on the screen could be “scrolled” up and down over a buffer of 80 char­ac­ters. IPSO pe­riph­eral com­pat­i­bil­ity was main­tained, but the P6060 in­cluded two eight inch floppy disk dri­ves of 256K, and RS242 and IEEE-488 con­nec­tors. One ad­di­tional ac­ces­sory was a VDU for use with CRT dis­plays. Software was sig­nif­i­cantly dif­fer­ent as this ma­chine shipped with BASIC, and the printer sup­ported all char­ac­ters and graph­ics sup­ported by the sys­tem it­self as well as fram­ing, scal­ing, off­set­ting, axis draw­ing, and la­bel­ing. With these two ad­van­tages, the P6060 would have been of great use to any­one need­ing to cre­ate re­ports or other of­fice doc­u­ments.

In the later part of the 1970s, Olivetti had around 62,000 em­ploy­ees, around $1.8 bil­lion in rev­enue (around $9 bil­lion in 2025 dol­lars), but even more debt with the com­pany los­ing around $10 mil­lion each month. This debt was large enough and ex­pen­sive enough that the broth­ers Carlo and Franco De Benedetti were able to pur­chase 14% of the com­pany for just $17 mil­lion. This gave Olivetti, at this time, a val­u­a­tion of just $121.42 mil­lion. It is rather dif­fi­cult for me to imag­ine the ire that Olivetti’s prior in­vestors must have felt, but yet, the com­pany could con­tinue.

Carlo De Benedetti was born on the 14th of November in 1934 in Turin. He’s of Jewish de­scent, and like Adriano, fled Italy for Switzerland dur­ing the Second World War. After the war, he re­turned to Italy, earned his bach­e­lor’s de­gree in elec­tri­cal en­gi­neer­ing from the Polytechnic University of Turin, and then went to work in his fa­ther’s busi­ness. He did well there, grew the com­pany prof­its, and led the ac­qui­si­tion of an­other com­pany. He was then CEO of the com­bined com­pany un­til 1976 when he be­came the CEO of CIR Group, a po­si­tion he held un­til 1978 when he be­came the CEO of Olivetti. Throughout his life, when po­lit­i­cal tur­moil struck Italy, he went to Switzerland. Later in his life, he at­tained Swiss cit­i­zen­ship. Just prior to the Olivetti ac­qui­si­tion, he was liv­ing there with his wife and three sons.

De Benedetti sought to com­pletely re­or­ga­nize the com­pany and change its fo­cus from type­writ­ers to mi­cro­com­put­ers. Nearly all of the com­pa­ny’s se­nior man­age­ment and nearly all of the com­pa­ny’s board mem­bers threat­ened to leave. De Benedetti then met with each per­son in­di­vid­u­ally and thor­oughly ex­plained his rea­son­ing. He was suc­cess­ful in per­suad­ing them, and the mass res­ig­na­tions never oc­curred. Much of his plan cen­tered on end­ing the gen­er­ous em­ployee ben­e­fit pro­grams, cut­ting me­chan­i­cal type­writ­ers, rene­go­ti­at­ing union con­tracts, and lay­offs to­tal­ing a lit­tle over 22,000 per­son­nel. De Benedetti’s Olivetti also pur­chased small stakes in var­i­ous other com­pa­nies pro­vid­ing ac­cess to more mar­kets, lower parts costs, and ac­cess to re­search.

The com­pa­ny’s of­fice sup­ply busi­ness was still go­ing strong with elec­tronic type­writ­ers and cal­cu­la­tors bring­ing in rev­enue. To this, Olivetti added copiers, and the com­pany ex­panded into cash reg­is­ters and ATM ma­chines.

In 1979, the work on a new com­puter be­gan at the Olivetti Advanced Technology Center in Cupertino. This ma­chine was built around the Zilog Z8001 at 4MHz, 128K base RAM ex­pand­able to 512K, two 5.25 inch floppy disk dri­ves sup­port­ing 320K flop­pies, and the Hitachi HD46505 CRTC. For ex­pan­sion, the M20 of­fered IEEE-488, RS232-C, and two in­ter­nal ex­pan­sion slots. The com­puter was of­fered with var­i­ous up­grades: higher ca­pac­ity FDDs, mem­ory, a 9.2MB HDD (and ac­com­pa­ny­ing con­troller card), Corvus Omninet LAN, and a while af­ter re­lease an 8086 CPU card. The choice of the 46505 meant that this ma­chine was vaguely com­pat­i­ble with IBM’s MDA, but that was the only piece of this ma­chine to of­fer any such com­pat­i­bil­ity un­til the re­lease of the Alternate Processor Board (APB, the 8086 card men­tioned pre­vi­ously). The M20’s dis­play out­put was 512 by 256 pix­els, and all dis­play modes were graph­i­cal. The com­puter was ca­pa­ble of pro­duc­ing eight col­ors when us­ing two 32K video mem­ory boards, but this dropped to just four col­ors from a palette of eight when us­ing a sin­gle video mem­ory board. The key ad­van­tage for Olivetti in this dis­play setup was that it could sup­port text at 80 by 25 or 64 by 16, and it could more eas­ily sup­port the var­i­ous lan­guages of Europe.

Given that this ma­chine was ini­tially de­signed around the Z8001, it lacked a na­tive op­er­at­ing sys­tem at the time of de­sign. This was solved with the Professional Computer Operating System or PCOS-8000. This was a sin­gle-user, sin­gle-task­ing, com­mand dri­ven op­er­at­ing sys­tem not too dis­sim­i­lar from CP/M or MS-DOS. Its com­mands, how­ever, were quite dif­fer­ent. For ex­am­ple, vf 1: would for­mat the disk in the left-most disk drive while fl would list the con­tents of a file. The lack of soft­ware for PCOS was well un­der­stood, and thus, a CP/M em­u­la­tor was made avail­able and it was of­ten bun­dled with dBase II, SuperCalc, and other com­mon soft­ware prod­ucts. The M20 was re­leased in 1982, and it sold well. The turn around had started and Olivetti re­ported pos­i­tive net in­come for 1982 with pos­i­tive earn­ings per share around 22¢.

De Benedetti wanted Olivetti com­put­ers to have much wider dis­tri­b­u­tion than the com­pany could achieve on its own. In par­tic­u­lar, he wanted the com­pany to have broad ac­cess to the American mar­ket. The first step to this was a truly IBM com­pat­i­ble ma­chine; the com­pany cre­ated the M24. The ma­chine was built around an 8MHz 8086 with an op­tional 8087, 128K RAM ex­pand­able to 640K, and a CGA com­pat­i­ble video card that was ac­tu­ally bet­ter than plain old CGA. The video card sup­ported 320 by 200, 640 by 200, and 640 by 400 with up to six­teen col­ors, and it sup­ported an ad­di­tional mode of 512 by 256 with eight col­ors. That last mode could be paired with a Z8001 card giv­ing the M24 com­pat­i­bil­ity with the M20. For ports, the ma­chine had RGB out (25pin), par­al­lel, RS232 (25pin), and a pro­pri­etary 9pin DSUB key­board con­nec­tor. Later mod­els added an­other 9pin con­nec­tor on the key­board for the at­tach­ment of a mouse, and added sup­port in BIOS for 3.5 inch FDDs.

The M24 had seven 8bit ISA slots for in­ter­nal ex­pan­sion, but four of these came pop­u­lated with a sec­ond adapter al­low­ing for 16bit cards to be added. The ex­pan­sions were on a sep­a­rate board from both the video card and moth­er­board, and this is where things get… weird. The moth­er­board was un­der­neath the ex­pan­sion board and video card, phys­i­cally sep­a­rated from them, and mounted up­side-down. The moth­er­board and ex­pan­sion board then had edge con­nec­tors that slot­ted into the video card which was mounted ver­ti­cally. Various con­fig­u­ra­tions of this ma­chine were launched in 1983. All of them fea­tured a twelve inch mon­i­tor and 5.25 inch 360K floppy disk drive, but that mon­i­tor could be green or am­ber mono­chrome, or it could be color. Each mon­i­tor com­bi­na­tion could then be paired with an op­tional 20MB HDD. The high­est end con­fig­u­ra­tion with HDD and color mon­i­tor would fea­ture a video card ca­pa­ble of six­teen col­ors at 640 by 400, while the lower end vari­ants all in­cluded a video card ca­pa­ble of just two col­ors at the same res­o­lu­tion. From what I can tell, the 8087 was avail­able for all mod­els. Pricing on the base model from Docutel/Olivetti in Texas started at $2745 while a more well equipped ma­chine started at $3395.

On the soft­ware side of things, the M24 ini­tially shipped with MS-DOS 2.1, a di­ag­nos­tic pro­gram, key­board dri­vers, util­i­ties, OLIMENU (TSR GUI sim­i­lar to TopView), and GW BASIC. Versions of Windows 1 and Windows 2 were avail­able for the M24, and it was sup­ported by Windows 3.0. Given the ma­chine’s com­pat­i­bil­ity prowess, it could also run CP/M-86, UCSD-P, COHERENT, and XENIX.

In 1983, Olivetti re­leased their first lap­top. This was largely the same ma­chine as the TRS-80 Model 100, but it had a phys­i­cal re­design with a tilt­ing screen. Base RAM was 8K and ex­pand­able to 32K. While the Model 100 was a suc­cess, the M10 was not. The ma­chine was dis­con­tin­ued af­ter two years.

The US Department of Justice and the American Telephone and Telegraph com­pany (AT&T) agreed on a plan to breakup AT&T on the 8th of January in 1982. That plan would be ex­e­cuted on the 1st of January in 1984. Seeing the loss of rev­enue from phone rentals on the hori­zon, AT&T needed new rev­enue sources, and they needed them as quickly as pos­si­ble. The at­ti­tude within AT&T was quite clear with signs in the com­pa­ny’s of­fices in 1983 read­ing with vari­a­tions on:

There are two gi­ant en­ti­ties at work in our coun­try, and they both have an amaz­ing in­flu­ence on our daily lives… one has given us radar, sonar, stereo, tele­type, the tran­sis­tor, hear­ing aids, ar­ti­fi­cial lar­ynxes, talk­ing movies, and the tele­phone. The other has given us the Civil War, the Spanish-American War, the First World War, the Second World War, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, dou­ble-digit in­fla­tion, dou­ble-digit un­em­ploy­ment, the Great Depression, the gaso­line cri­sis, and the Watergate fi­asco. Guess which one is now try­ing to tell the other one how to run its busi­ness?

AT&T knew that the prod­ucts built upon the com­pa­ny’s many in­no­va­tions in tech­nol­ogy were gen­er­at­ing large sums of money, and now freed of its le­gal pro­hi­bi­tion from en­ter­ing the com­puter mar­ket, it wanted to cap­i­tal­ize on those in­no­va­tions. The com­pany sim­ply did­n’t have the time to do this on its own. The M24 was quickly suc­cess­ful in Europe, was a great prod­uct, and it beat the IBM PC and XT, com­pet­ing well with the Compaq Deskpro. Olivetti, mean­while, needed cash and more mar­ket ac­cess. On the 21st of December in 1983, AT&T an­nounced the pur­chase of 100 mil­lion shares of Olivetti for $4.26 mil­lion. This made AT&T the sin­gle largest share­holder at 25% while De Benedetti main­tained 15%. Olivetti was now able to mar­ket AT&T prod­ucts in Europe, and AT&T could mar­ket Olivetti prod­ucts in the USA.

Because of this deal, most peo­ple in the USA would­n’t know the M24 as an Olivetti. Had an American used an M24, it would likely have been the AT&T PC 6300 (or less com­monly the Xerox 6060, or in France as the Persona 1600 by LogAbax). The 6300 saw a re­vi­sion in October of 1985 as the 6300 Plus fea­tur­ing a 6MHz 80286, and this ma­chine could run MS-DOS and UNIX System V con­cur­rently via Simultask. The M24 saw a re­vi­sion in November 1985 as the M24 SP with a 10MHz 8086. By 1986, Olivetti was the mar­ket leader in Europe and the third largest PC man­u­fac­turer on Earth. Unfortunately for AT&T the 6300 Plus was a mar­ket fail­ure. In late 1986, AT&T ceded all pro­duc­tion and de­vel­op­ment of its PC prod­ucts to Olivetti.

The British com­puter mar­ket had been some­what im­pen­e­tra­ble for out­siders, but one promi­nent maker was strug­gling, Acorn. On the 20th of February in 1985, Olivetti pur­chased nearly half of Acorn Computers giv­ing the com­pany im­me­di­ate ac­cess to the UK and an as­tound­ing amount of tech­nol­ogy. One of the first fruits of this ac­qui­si­tion was the Prodest PC 128S which was an Italian lo­cal­ized BBC Master Compact.

The Olivetti M28 was in­tro­duced in late 1986 as an AT com­peti­tor. It shipped with an Intel 80286 clocked at 8MHz, up to 1MB of RAM (expandable to 7MB), a 5.25 inch floppy disk drive sup­port­ing 1.2MB disks, a 20MB to 70MB HDD, and MS-DOS 3.2 or XENIX. The M28 con­tin­ued to use Olivetti’s en­hanced CGA card, and it al­lowed more ex­pan­sion op­tions than its pre­de­ces­sor. Pricing started at around $3000, and it was of­fered in North America as the AT&T PC 6310 and in France as the Persona 1800.

One of Olivetti’s largest com­peti­tors in Europe was Triumph-Adler (owner of Pertec, MITS, Omnidata). On the 22nd of April in 1986, Olivetti pur­chased 98.4% of Triumph-Adler and be­came the largest of­fice sup­ply com­pany in Europe and held more than 50% of the type­writer mar­ket.

From 1987 to 1994, Olivetti pro­duced five dis­tinct lines of work­sta­tion ma­chines. The 3000 se­ries (1987) uti­lized the Motorola 68000 (likely through Thomson or SGS-Thomson with whom Olivetti still main­tained var­i­ous part­ner­ships) and later the Edge Computer vari­ants of the 68000, the 4000 se­ries (1992) uti­lized the Intel i860 or Motorola de­pend­ing upon the spe­cific model, the 5000 se­ries (1990) uti­lized the Intel 486 and later the Pentium, the 6000 se­ries (1991) uti­lized MIPS, and the 7000 se­ries (1994) uti­lized DEC Alpha. The early sys­tems shipped with X/OS which was, mostly, 4.2BSD. Later mod­els shipped with Xenix, NT, or VMS de­pend­ing upon the CPU in use.

Iterations of Acorn ma­chines, re­badged Thomson ma­chines, and Olivetti’s own M28 fol­lowed un­til roughly 1994.

The Olivetti Quaderno (PT-XT-20) was re­leased in 1992 with an NEC V30 run­ning at 16MHz, 1MB of RAM, a 20MB 2.5 inch HDD, PCMCIA, and MS-DOS 5. The dis­play was an LCD with four lev­els of gray and a res­o­lu­tion of 640 by 400. It ran on six AA bat­ter­ies. While vi­su­ally awe­some, the most in­cred­i­ble as­pect was the ma­chine’s size: 8.27 inches by 5.83 inches by 1.26 inches. Despite hav­ing diminu­tive di­men­sions the ma­chine con­tained a sound con­troller with both in­put and out­put and had a built in mi­cro­phone, a fax mo­dem, se­r­ial, par­al­lel, video out, PS/2 key­board/​mouse, and some bun­dled pro­duc­tiv­ity soft­ware. Interestingly, Olivetti made this Quaderno ca­pa­ble of act­ing as an an­swer­ing ma­chine. The ma­chine won awards for de­sign but was ridiculed for hav­ing very lit­tle com­put­ing power.

To over­come the de­fi­cien­cies of the prior model, Olivetti quickly re­leased the Quaderno 33 (PT-AT-60). This ma­chine uti­lized a 20MHz AMD 386SXLV, 4MB of RAM, a 60MB HDD, and a back­lit, seven inch LCD ca­pa­ble of six­teen gray lev­els at 640 by 480. This model fur­ther fea­tured Windows 3.1, Microsoft Works, and Lotus Organizer. The AAs were gone and power came from nickel-cad­mium cells. Combined with power man­age­ment fea­tures, this lit­tle lap­top could man­age six hours of op­er­a­tion per charge.

In September of 1994, Olivetti launched Olivetti Telemedia chaired by Elserino Piol. This com­pany then formed a joint ven­ture with Bell Atlantic called Omnitel Pronto Italia with Francesco Caio as CEO. They went on to form Italy’s sec­ond GSM mo­bile net­work, first pri­vately held, launched in December of 1995. The com­pany had 300,000 sub­scribers within its first six months of op­er­a­tion.

With the ar­rival of the CD-ROM, the Pentium, great sound, and high res­o­lu­tion dis­plays, the PC was be­com­ing a mul­ti­me­dia pow­er­house. Olivetti saw an op­por­tu­nity to con­quer the liv­ing room as they’d once con­quered the of­fice. The com­pany sought to cre­ate a com­put­ing ap­pli­ance that would de­liver au­dio, video, fax, and a tele­phone an­swer­ing ma­chine to the buyer. The prod­uct was the Olivetti Envision re­leased in 1995. There were two mod­els with ei­ther a 486DX4 at 100MHz or a Pentium at 75MHz. Both were equipped with 8MB of RAM, a Trident TGV9470 with 1MB of video RAM ca­pa­ble of 1024 by 768 with 256 col­ors, a Crystal CS4231 au­dio con­troller paired and an Oak Mozart OTI 605 (Adlib com­pat­i­ble but with an IDE CD-ROM con­troller), a 1.4MB 3.5 inch FDD, 635MB HDD, CD-ROM, an in­frared re­mote, and an 83key key­board with an in­te­grated track­ball op­er­at­ing over in­frared. For ex­ter­nal con­nec­tors, the Envision fea­tured two SCART ports, au­dio out, MIDI, VGA out, se­r­ial, par­al­lel, and RJ11. Internally, the ma­chine had three ex­pan­sion slots, and a satel­lite TV de­coder card was avail­able. The Envision could op­er­ate in three dis­tinct modes. The first was as a true en­ter­tain­ment de­vice with the re­mote where a user could con­trol vol­ume, play au­dio or video CDs, and view pho­tos stored on CDs. The sec­ond was with the key­board where the user nav­i­gated the Olipilot shell over Windows 95. The third mode was as a stan­dard Windows PC. The Envision was largely a fail­ure. It was ex­pen­sive (especially with a Pentium), and it had quite a few bugs.

Olivetti had some rather se­ri­ous is­sues dur­ing the early 1990s. Competition in the PC mar­ket, printer mar­ket, and copier mar­ket were lead­ing to high R&D costs and forc­ing the com­pany to ac­cu­mu­late debt. In 1991, the Italian econ­omy went into an in­fla­tion­ary re­ces­sion, and the gov­ern­ment an­nounced aus­ter­ity mea­sures. Olivetti had been prof­itable for thir­teen con­sec­u­tive years, but posted a pre­tax loss of $59 mil­lion for the first half of the year on the 11th of November in 1991 fol­low­ing four years of de­clin­ing rev­enues. De Benedetti stated to the New York Times that he’d “reassume the di­rect and com­plete man­age­ment” of the com­pany. By 1996, the com­pany had laid off roughly 28,000 peo­ple, more than half of their 1989 head­count.

In June of 1996, De Benedetti re­signed as CEO and Corrado Passera briefly filled the role. He was then re­placed by Francesco Caio on the 4th of July. De Benedetti re­signed as chair­man on the 3rd of September (though he re­tained 14% of the com­pany through his com­pany CIR). On the 18th of September, Olivetti held an emer­gency board meet­ing and fired Caio. The board ap­pointed Roberto Colaninno as re­place­ment. Several for­mer ex­ec­u­tives, in­clud­ing De Benedetti, were un­der in­ves­ti­ga­tion by Italian au­thor­i­ties for hav­ing un­der­stated the losses of Olivetti af­ter Renzo Francesconi who’d only been CFO for six weeks re­signed in late August and promptly ac­cused the com­pany of fi­nan­cial im­pro­pri­ety. When the dust set­tled and in­ves­ti­ga­tions ended, no one was ever for­mally charged with any crime.

On the 12th of March in 2003, Marco Tronchetti Provera, who was chair­man of both Telecom Italia and Olivetti, an­nounced his in­ten­tion to merge the two com­pa­nies, a move ap­par­ently en­gi­neered by Colaninno. Olivetti took 51% of Telecom Italia’s shares, and the com­bined en­tity be­came the TIM group.

I’ve omit­ted many com­put­ers and the sto­ries of many peo­ple. Partially this is due to length, and par­tially due to sources, lan­guage bar­ri­ers, and the fact that many weren’t too in­ter­est­ing. I apol­o­gize to those whose sto­ries were left out, and I’m sorry if I did­n’t cover your fa­vorite ma­chine.

Olivetti’s his­tory can be di­vided into three dis­tinct parts. First, there were type­writ­ers. As the cri­sis of this first era mounted, the com­pany moved into mi­cro­com­put­ers for its sec­ond era. With the IBM PC dom­i­nat­ing the world, the com­pany moved into its PC era. When this era came into cri­sis, the com­pany ul­ti­mately ended in a merger, and that en­tity be­came a telco. Olivetti was an im­pres­sive com­pany that achieved great­ness. It was cut down by the same forces that af­fected so many oth­ers. The race to the bot­tom in PC pric­ing meant that only the most ef­fi­cient man­u­fac­tur­ers re­mained stand­ing.

My dear read­ers, many of you worked at, ran, or even founded the com­pa­nies I cover here on ARF, and some of you were pre­sent at those com­pa­nies for the time pe­ri­ods I cover. A few of you have been men­tioned by name. All cor­rec­tions to the record are sin­cerely wel­come, and I would love any ad­di­tional in­sights, cor­rec­tions, or feed­back (especially for this ar­ti­cle as I suck at Italian). Please feel free to leave a com­ment.

Back in the day, light mode was­n’t called “light mode”. It was just the way that com­put­ers were, we did­n’t re­ally think about turn­ing every­thing light or dark. Sure, some ap­pli­ca­tions were of­ten dark (photo ed­i­tors, IDEs, ter­mi­nals) but every­thing else was light, and that was fine.

What we did­n’t no­tice is that light mode has been slowly get­ting lighter, and I’ve got a graph to prove it. I did what any nor­mal per­son would do, I down­loaded the same (or sim­i­lar) screen­shots from the MacOS Screenshot Library on 512 Pixels. This pro­ject would have been much more dif­fi­cult with­out a sin­gle place to get well-or­gan­ised screen­shots from. I cropped each im­age so just a rep­re­sen­ta­tive sec­tion of the win­dow was pre­sent, here shown with a pink­ish rec­tan­gle:

Then used Pillow to get the av­er­age light­ness of each cropped im­age:

This ig­nores any kind of per­ceived bright­ness or the tint­ing that MacOS has been do­ing for a while based on your wall­pa­per colour. I could go down a mas­sive tan­gent try­ing to work out ex­actly what the best way to mea­sure this is, but given that the screen­shots aren’t per­fectly com­pa­ra­ble be­tween ver­sions, com­par­ing the av­er­age bright­ness of a greyscale im­age seems rea­son­able.

I graphed that on the re­lease year of each OS ver­sion, do­ing the same for dark mode:

This graph is an SVG, which may not ren­der cor­rectly in feed read­ers. View this post on the web.

You can clearly see that the bright­ness of the UI has been steadily in­creas­ing for the last 16 years. The up­per line is the de­fault mode/​light mode, the lower line is dark mode. When I started us­ing MacOS in 2012, I was run­ning Snow Leopard, the win­dows had an av­er­age bright­ness of 71%. Since then they’ve steadily in­creased so that in MacOS Tahoe, they’re at a full 100%.

What I’ve graphed here is just the bright­ness of the win­dow chrome, which is­n’t re­ally rep­re­sen­ta­tive of the ac­tual to­tal screen bright­ness. A bet­ter study would be look­ing at the over­all bright­ness of a typ­i­cal set of apps. The de­fault back­ground colour for win­dows, as well as the colours for in­ac­tive win­dows, would prob­a­bly give a more com­plete pic­ture.

For ex­am­ple, in Tahoe the dark­est colour in a typ­i­cal light-mode win­dow is the colour of a sec­tion in an in­ac­tive set­tings win­dow, at 97% bright­ness. In Snow Leopard the equiv­a­lent colour was 90%, and that was one of the bright­est parts of the win­dow, since the win­dow chrome was typ­i­cally darker than the win­dow con­tent.

I tried to re­mem­ber ex­actly when I started us­ing dark mode all the time on MacOS. I’ve al­ways used a dark back­ground for my ed­i­tor and ter­mi­nal, but I was­n’t sure when I swapped the sys­tem theme across. When it first came out I seem to re­mem­ber think­ing that it looked gross.

It ob­vi­ously could­n’t be ear­lier than 2018, as that’s when dark mode was in­tro­duced in MacOS Mojave. I’m pretty sure that when I up­dated my per­sonal lap­top to an M1 MacBook Air at the end of 2020 that I set it to use dark mode. This would make sense, be­cause the Big Sur up­date bumped the bright­ness from 85% to 97%, which prob­a­bly pushed me over the edge.

I think the rea­son this hap­pens is that if you look at two de­signs, pho­tos, or what­ever, it’s re­ally easy to be drawn in to lik­ing the brighter one more. Or if they’re pre­dom­i­nantly dark, then the darker one. I’ve done it my­self with this very site. If I’m tweak­ing the colours it’s easy to bump up the bright­ness on the back­ground and go “ooh wow yeah that’s def­i­nitely cleaner”, then swap it back and go “ewww it looks like it needs a good scrub”. If it’s the dark mode colours, then a darker back­ground will just look cooler.

I’m not a de­signer, but I as­sume that re­sist­ing this urge is some­thing you learn in de­sign school. Just like mak­ing a web­site look good with a non-greyscale back­ground.

This year in iOS 26, some UI el­e­ments use the HDR screen to make some el­e­ments and high­lights brighter than 100% white. This year it’s rea­son­ably sub­tle, but the in­fla­tion po­ten­tial is there. If you’ve ever looked at an HDR photo on an iPhone (or any other HDR screen) then looked at the UI that’s still be­ing shown in SDR, you’ll know just how grey and sad it looks. If you’re de­sign­ing a new UI, how tempt­ing will it be to make just a lit­tle bit more of it just a lit­tle bit brighter?

As some­one whose job in­volves look­ing at MacOS for a lot of the day, I find that I ba­si­cally have to use dark mode to avoid look­ing at a dis­play where all the sys­tem UI is 100% white blast­ing in my eyes. But the al­ter­na­tive does­n’t have to be near-black for that, I would hap­pily have a UI that’s a medium grey. In fact what I’ve missed since swap­ping to us­ing dark mode is that I don’t have con­trast be­tween win­dows. Everything looks the same, whether it’s a text ed­i­tor, IDE, ter­mi­nal, web browser, or Finder win­dow. All black, all the time.

Somewhat in the spirit of Mavericks Forever, if I were to pick an old MacOS de­sign to go back to it would prob­a­bly be Yosemite. I don’t have any nos­tal­gia for skeuo­mor­phic brushed metal or stitched leather, but I do quite like the flat­tened de­sign and blur ef­fects that Yosemite brought. Ironically Yosemite was a sub­stan­tial jump in bright­ness from pre­vi­ous ver­sions.

So if you’re mak­ing an in­ter­face or web­site, be bold and choose a 50% grey. My eyes will thank you.

Add AP News as your pre­ferred source to see more of our sto­ries on Google.

Add AP News as your pre­ferred source to see more of our sto­ries on Google.

WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. (AP) — President Donald Trump said Saturday that he would charge a 10% im­port tax start­ing in February on goods from eight European na­tions be­cause of their op­po­si­tion to American con­trol of Greenland, set­ting up a po­ten­tially dan­ger­ous test of U. S. part­ner­ships in Europe.

Denmark, Norway, Sweden, France, Germany, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands and Finland would face the tar­iff, Trump said in a so­cial me­dia post while at his golf club in West Palm Beach, Florida. The rate would climb to 25% on June 1 if no deal was in place for “the Complete and Total pur­chase of Greenland” by the United States, he said.

The Republican pres­i­dent ap­peared to in­di­cate that he was us­ing the tar­iffs as lever­age to force talks with Denmark and other European coun­tries over the sta­tus of Greenland, a semi­au­tonomous ter­ri­tory of NATO ally Denmark that he re­gards as crit­i­cal to U. S. na­tional se­cu­rity.

“The United States of America is im­me­di­ately open to ne­go­ti­a­tion with Denmark and/​or any of these Countries that have put so much at risk, de­spite all that we have done for them,” Trump said on Truth Social.

The tar­iff threat could mark a prob­lem­atic rup­ture be­tween Trump and America’s long­time NATO part­ners, fur­ther strain­ing an al­liance that dates to 1949 and pro­vides a col­lec­tive de­gree of se­cu­rity to Europe and North America. Trump has re­peat­edly tried to use trade penal­ties to bend al­lies and ri­vals alike to his will, gen­er­at­ing in­vest­ment com­mit­ments from some na­tions and push­back from oth­ers, no­tably China.

Trump is sched­uled to travel on Tuesday to the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, where he likely will run into the European lead­ers he just threat­ened with tar­iffs that would start in lit­tle more than two weeks.

Danish Foreign Minister Lars Løkke Rasmussen said Trump’s move was a “surprise” given the “constructive meet­ing” with top U. S. of­fi­cials this week in Washington.

The European Commission’s pres­i­dent, Ursula von der Leyen, and the head of the European Council, Antonio Costa, said in a joint state­ment that tar­iffs “would un­der­mine transat­lantic re­la­tions and risk a dan­ger­ous down­ward spi­ral.” They said Europe would re­main “committed to up­hold­ing its sov­er­eignty.”

There are im­me­di­ate ques­tions about how the White House could try to im­ple­ment the tar­iffs be­cause the EU is a sin­gle eco­nomic zone in terms of trad­ing, ac­cord­ing to a European diplo­mat who was not au­tho­rized to com­ment pub­licly and spoke on the con­di­tion of anonymity. It was un­clear, too, how Trump could act un­der U. S. law, though he could cite emer­gency eco­nomic pow­ers that are cur­rently sub­ject to a U.S. Supreme Court chal­lenge.

Trump has long said he thinks the U. S. should own the strate­gi­cally lo­cated and min­eral-rich is­land, which has a pop­u­la­tion of about 57,000 and whose de­fense is pro­vided by Denmark. He in­ten­si­fied his calls a day af­ter the mil­i­tary op­er­a­tion to oust Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro ear­lier this month.

The pres­i­dent in­di­cated the tar­iffs were re­tal­i­a­tion for what ap­peared to be the de­ploy­ment of s ym­bolic lev­els of troops from the European coun­tries to Greenland, which he has said was es­sen­tial for the “Golden Dome” mis­sile de­fense sys­tem for the U. S., He also has ar­gued that Russia and China might try to take over the is­land.

The U. S. al­ready has ac­cess to Greenland un­der a 1951 de­fense agree­ment. Since 1945, the American mil­i­tary pres­ence in Greenland has de­creased from thou­sands of sol­diers over 17 bases and in­stal­la­tions to 200 at the re­mote Pituffik Space Base in the north­west of the is­land, the Danish for­eign min­is­ter has said. That base sup­ports mis­sile warn­ing, mis­sile de­fense and space sur­veil­lance op­er­a­tions for the U.S. and NATO.

Resistance has steadily built in Europe to Trump’s am­bi­tions even as sev­eral coun­tries on the con­ti­nent agreed to his 15% tar­iffs last year in or­der to pre­serve an eco­nomic and se­cu­rity re­la­tion­ship with Washington.

French President Emmanuel Macron, in a so­cial me­dia post, seemed to equate the tar­iff threat to Russian leader Vladimir Putin’s war in Ukraine.

“No in­tim­i­da­tion or threats will in­flu­ence us, whether in Ukraine, Greenland or any­where else in the world when we are faced with such sit­u­a­tions,” Macron said in a trans­lated post on X.

Earlier Saturday, hun­dreds of peo­ple in Greenland’s cap­i­tal, Nuuk, braved near-freez­ing tem­per­a­tures, rain and icy streets to march in a rally in sup­port of their own self-gov­er­nance.

Thousands of peo­ple also marched through Copenhagen, many of them car­ry­ing Greenland’s flag. Some held signs with slo­gans such as “Make America Smart Again” and “Hands Off.”

“This is im­por­tant for the whole world,” Danish pro­tester Elise Riechie told The Associated Press as she held Danish and Greenlandic flags. “There are many small coun­tries. None of them are for sale.”

The ral­lies oc­curred hours af­ter a bi­par­ti­san del­e­ga­tion of U. S. law­mak­ers, while vis­it­ing Copenhagen, sought to re­as­sure Denmark and Greenland of their sup­port.

Danish Maj. Gen. Søren Andersen, leader of the Joint Arctic Command, told the AP that Denmark does not ex­pect the U. S. mil­i­tary to at­tack Greenland, or any other NATO ally, and that European troops were re­cently de­ployed to Nuuk for Arctic de­fense train­ing.

He said the goal is not to send a mes­sage to the Trump ad­min­is­tra­tion, even though the White House has not ruled out tak­ing the ter­ri­tory by force.

“I will not go into the po­lit­i­cal part, but I will say that I would never ex­pect a NATO coun­try to at­tack an­other NATO coun­try,” he said from aboard a Danish mil­i­tary ves­sel docked in Nuuk. “For us, for me, it’s not about sig­nal­ing. It is ac­tu­ally about train­ing mil­i­tary units, work­ing to­gether with al­lies.”

The Danish mil­i­tary or­ga­nized a plan­ning meet­ing Friday in Greenland with NATO al­lies, in­clud­ing the U. S., to dis­cuss Arctic se­cu­rity on the al­liance’s north­ern flank in the face of a po­ten­tial Russian threat. The Americans were also in­vited to par­tic­i­pate in Operation Arctic Endurance in Greenland in the com­ing days, Andersen said.

In his 2½ years as a com­man­der in Greenland, Andersen said that he has­n’t seen any Chinese or Russian com­bat ves­sels or war­ships, de­spite Trump say­ing that they were off the is­land’s coast.

But in the un­likely event of American troops us­ing force on Danish soil, Andersen con­firmed that Danish sol­diers have an oblig­a­tion to fight back.

Trump has con­tended that China and Russia have their own de­signs on Greenland and its vast un­tapped re­serves of crit­i­cal min­er­als. He said re­cently that any­thing less than the Arctic is­land be­ing in U. S. hands would be “unacceptable.”

The pres­i­dent has seen tar­iffs as a tool to get what he wants with­out hav­ing to re­sort to mil­i­tary ac­tions. At the White House on Friday, he re­counted how he had threat­ened European al­lies with tar­iffs on phar­ma­ceu­ti­cals and he teased the pos­si­bil­ity of do­ing so again.

“I may do that for Greenland, too,” Trump said.

After Trump fol­lowed through, Rep. Don Bacon, R-Neb., said “Congress must re­claim tar­iff au­thor­i­ties” so that they are not used solely at a pres­i­den­t’s dis­cre­tion.

Denmark said this week that it was in­creas­ing its mil­i­tary pres­ence in Greenland in co­op­er­a­tion with al­lies.

“There is al­most no bet­ter ally to the United States than Denmark,” said Sen. Chris Coons, D-Del., while vis­it­ing Copenhagen with other mem­bers of Congress. “If we do things that cause Danes to ques­tion whether we can be counted on as a NATO ally, why would any other coun­try seek to be our ally or be­lieve in our rep­re­sen­ta­tions?”

Burrows re­ported from Nuuk, Greenland, and Niemann from Copenhagen, Denmark. Associated Press writ­ers Stefanie Dazio in Berlin, Aamer Madhani in Washington, Jill Lawless in London and Kwiyeon Ha and Evgeniy Maloletka in Nuuk con­tributed to this re­port.

Can We Still Govern?What life is like in Minneapolis nowFrom Don: This piece comes some­one liv­ing and work­ing in Minneapolis, which is ex­pe­ri­enc­ing a de facto mil­i­tary oc­cu­pa­tion right now. They wish to re­main anony­mous out of con­cern that their gov­ern­ment might re­tal­i­ate against them for re­port­ing on what life is like there now. Please share this story so peo­ple can un­der­stand how bad things are on the ground. I am writ­ing as an or­di­nary cit­i­zen of Minneapolis/St Paul ─ one of America’s 20 largest metro ar­eas. I have kids in the pub­lic schools, own a house, go to work every day, pay taxes, vol­un­teer in my com­mu­nity (e.g., coach­ing youth sports, help­ing in the schools). I am cer­tainly not a rad­i­cal of any kind. I had never done any com­mu­nity or­ga­niz­ing work be­fore last month. I am writ­ing this to share with the out­side world what is re­ally go­ing on ─ the ter­ror be­ing in­flicted upon a U.S. city and state by our fed­eral gov­ern­ment. If you are so moved, see be­low to learn how you can help. Here is what is hap­pen­ing right now:Con­sider the fol­low­ing ex­am­ple in­ci­dents, all from the last ten days or so. I will not pro­vide names, sources, etc. be­cause many peo­ple are in ac­tive dan­ger. But the gen­eral pat­tern has been well doc­u­mented,As a large, pub­lic Minneapolis high school was dis­miss­ing stu­dents for the day, two teach­ers parked in front of the school were vi­o­lently ex­tracted from their cars and ab­ducted by ICE of­fi­cers. No war­rants were pre­sented; no doc­u­ments re­quested or checked. Both ab­ducted teach­ers were US cit­i­zens.Stu­dents ob­serv­ing the ab­duc­tions were as­saulted with pep­per spray by the fed­eral of­fi­cers, with some flee­ing to shel­ter in the pub­lic li­brary across the street. In re­sponse, Minneapolis pub­lic schools can­celed classes for two days and sub­se­quently went to a hy­brid at­ten­dance op­tion ─ be­cause, as they told par­ents in an email, they did not feel they could keep their stu­dents safe. This is our fed­eral gov­ern­ment ter­ror­iz­ing its cit­i­zens.Dur­ing a sub­se­quent hy­brid class in the same school ─ with mostly White stu­dents in the class­room and mostly stu­dents of color on­line ─ an on­line stu­den­t’s apart­ment build­ing was raided by fed­eral of­fi­cers. The teacher had to stop class to sup­port the af­fected stu­dent, who was right­fully ter­ri­fied. Class was in­ter­rupted for the day as stu­dents texted or called their fam­i­lies for sup­port.None of our stu­dents feel psy­cho­log­i­cally safe; learn­ing has all but come to a halt. This is our fed­eral gov­ern­ment ter­ror­iz­ing its cit­i­zens.A man walk­ing his child to the school bus stop in the morn­ing was ab­ducted by fed­eral of­fi­cers. A child was left aban­doned and ter­ri­fied on the street. This is our fed­eral gov­ern­ment ter­ror­iz­ing its cit­i­zens.These are just re­cent ex­am­ples known to me. Beyond all of this, the biggest con­cern in many Twin Cities schools right now is ac­cess to food and keep­ing peo­ple housed. People at risk of ab­duc­tion are now un­der­stand­ably un­will­ing to leave home ─ mean­ing they can’t go to their jobs, and they can’t shop for food and other ne­ces­si­ties. Affected kids don’t get meals at school. Local com­mu­ni­ties are or­ga­niz­ing to feed hun­dreds … thou­sands? … of ter­ri­fied fam­i­lies who are hid­ing from our fed­eral gov­ern­ment. Nearly every­one in these fam­i­lies is a U.S. cit­i­zen or oth­er­wise legally in the United States. Federal agents abduct peo­ple and ask ques­tions later; if your skin is not White, you are pre­sumed guilty un­til proven oth­er­wise. An analy­sis by our lo­cal Fox News TV sta­tion found only about 5% of the ~2,000 peo­ple ar­rested by fed­eral agents have records of vi­o­lent crim­i­nal con­vic­tions. The streets are ex­tremely tense and chaotic­There are thou­sands of ICE and other fed­eral of­fi­cers in the metro area ac­tively pa­trolling the streets. In nearly all im­mi­grant and Black and Latino neigh­bor­hoods, there are mul­ti­ple at­tempted armed ab­duc­tions of res­i­dents every day. (Such events also hap­pen, al­beit less fre­quently, in more eco­nom­i­cally priv­i­leged neigh­bor­hoods: Housecleaners, con­struc­tion work­ers, etc. are the tar­gets in those cases.) Residents of Twin Cities neigh­bor­hoods are or­ga­niz­ing to re­spond peace­fully and in ac­cord with their es­tab­lished con­sti­tu­tional rights.From the Star Tribune: There are more im­mi­gra­tion agents in the Twin Cities than there are po­liceAll of this means that the fol­low­ing dystopian sce­nario plays out in the open dozens of times per day in the Twin Cities: Multiple masked and armed agents in com­bat gear amass in un­marked cars out­side a house or busi­ness. A by­stander no­tices and alerts the neigh­bor­hood. A dozen or more neigh­bor­hood res­i­dents ap­pear within min­utes to legally ob­serve, legally film the en­counter, legally make sure the tar­geted peo­ple know their rights, and legally warn oth­ers by blow­ing whis­tles and honk­ing car horns.The tar­geted peo­ple ─ again, al­most all of whom are U.S. cit­i­zens or in the U.S. legally ─ are ab­ducted and fre­quently sent to jail in Texas or Louisiana or else­where within 24 hours; hope­fully the neigh­bor­hood ob­servers were able to get their name and a phone num­ber for a friend or fam­ily mem­ber. The neigh­bor­hood ob­servers, peace­fully prac­tic­ing their le­gal rights, are la­belled ter­ror­ists by their gov­ern­ment. Or, worse, they are also ab­ducted by fed­eral agents and de­tained at the (federal) Whipple Building at Fort Snelling (ironically, the site of the largest mass ex­e­cu­tion by the U.S. gov­ern­ment in our na­tion’s his­tory in 1862) for many hours be­fore be­ing re­leased with no charges made against them. This is our fed­eral gov­ern­ment ter­ror­iz­ing its cit­i­zens.In ad­di­tion to their pres­ence on our streets and in our busi­nesses, the fed­eral of­fi­cers ap­pear to be im­mune to pun­ish­ment for break­ing traf­fic laws. They rou­tinely run red lights, do dan­ger­ous U-turns, drive far over the speed limit, etc. Not in marked cars with sirens and lights ─ but in or­di­nary rental cars and other un­marked ve­hi­cles. This is all hap­pen­ing on Minnesota’s very icy January roads, which most fed­eral agents are not used to dri­ving on.There is no il­lu­sion on the ground in the Twin Cities that the com­mu­nity can “defeat” ICE or drive out the fed­eral forces vi­o­lently oc­cu­py­ing our city. The “terrorists” and “Antifa” that the Trump Administration speaks of ─ aka, neigh­bor­hood groups or­ga­niz­ing to peace­fully and legally sup­port their neigh­bors ─ in­stead gen­er­ally have three goals:Make sure ab­ducted peo­ple know their rights and that those rights are re­spected.Doc­u­ment ab­duc­tions so that fed­eral agents can­not “disappear” peo­ple — again, many of whom are U.S. cit­i­zens or are legally in the coun­try.Sup­port af­fected fam­i­lies how­ever pos­si­ble ─ mostly with food, trans­porta­tion, and fi­nan­cial and le­gal as­sis­tance.Trump ad­min­is­tra­tion claims of a vi­o­lent in­sur­rec­tion are sim­ply not true. Ordinary cit­i­zens are try­ing to legally ob­serve, record, and min­i­mize dam­age from the as­sault on our com­mu­ni­ties. They are try­ing to pre­vent our fed­eral gov­ern­ment from il­le­gally ab­duct­ing peo­ple based on the color of their skin. They are try­ing to pre­vent some­thing akin to the round­ing up of Jewish (in Europe) and Japanese (in the U.S.) peo­ple in the lead up to and dur­ing World War II. They are try­ing to pre­vent the atroc­i­ties of his­tory from re­peat­ing them­selves in our city and our state in 2026.valid war­rant ICE uses a bat­ter­ing ram to in­vade the home of a man who has lived in America since he was a child, and had been reg­u­larly check­ing in with im­mi­gra­tion au­thor­i­ties.The sen­ti­ment on the ground is that things are poised to get worse. Maybe much worse. One more spark of vi­o­lence seems to be all that is re­quired for the ad­min­is­tra­tion to de­clare an in­sur­rec­tion and send in the mil­i­tary. We are hold­ing our col­lec­tive breath.How can you help?Do you want to help peo­ple in our city? I rec­om­mend three things.First, if you live in a po­lit­i­cally “red” or “purple” state, call your elected (especially Republican) of­fi­cials and tell them to op­pose mass ICE raids. Tell them you will not tol­er­ate what is hap­pen­ing in Minnesota any­where in your coun­try and that their lack of ac­tion to pro­tect U.S. cit­i­zens and other le­gal res­i­dents will heav­ily in­flu­ence your vote in November.Second, send money. Pick a rep­utable (non-government) im­mi­grant rights or­ga­ni­za­tion, pub­lic school PTA or sup­port or­ga­ni­za­tion, or (non-government) so­cial ser­vice agency. Send them as much money as you are com­fort­able send­ing; they need it des­per­ately (mainly to feed peo­ple and pro­vide le­gal as­sis­tance, but there are many other needs). Third, di­rectly reach out to your friends or fam­ily mem­bers in the Twin Cities … every day. Like me, they need to know that the world is aware of what is hap­pen­ing here and cares.

Here we go again, the tech press is hav­ing an­other AI doom cy­cle.

I’ve pri­mar­ily writ­ten this as a re­sponse to an NYT an­a­lyst paint­ing a com­pletely un­sub­stan­ti­ated, base­less, spec­u­la­tive, out­ra­geous, EGREGIOUS, pre­pos­ter­ous “grim pic­ture” on OpenAI go­ing bust.

Mate come on. OpenAI is not dy­ing, they’re not run­ning out of money. Yes, they’re cre­at­ing pos­si­bly the cra­zi­est cir­cu­lar econ­omy and de­fy­ing every eco­nom­ics law since Adam Smith pub­lished ‘The Wealth of Nations’. $1T in com­mit­ments is gen­uinely in­sane. But I doubt they’re look­ing to be ac­quired; hon­estly by who? you don’t raise $40 BILLION at $260 BILLION VALUATION to get ac­quired. It’s all for the $1T IPO.

But it seems that the pin­na­cle of hu­man in­tel­li­gence: the great­est, smartest, bright­est minds have all come to­gether to… build us an­other ad en­gine. What hap­pened to su­per­in­tel­li­gence and AGI?

See if OpenAI was not a di­rect threat to the cur­rent ad gi­ants would Google be ad­ver­tis­ing Gemini every chance they get? Don’t for­get they’re also cap­i­tal­is­ing on their brand new high-in­tent ad fun­nel by launch­ing ads on Gemini and AI overview.

March: Closed $40B fund­ing round at $260B val­u­a­tion, the largest raise by a pri­vate tech com­pany on record.

July: First $1B rev­enue month, dou­bled from $500M monthly in January.

January 2026: “Both our Weekly Active User (WAU) and Daily Active User (DAU) fig­ures con­tinue to pro­duce all-time-highs (Jan 14 was the high­est, Jan 13 was the sec­ond high­est, etc.)”

January 16, 2026: Announced ads in ChatGPT free and Go tiers.

Yes, OpenAI is burn­ing $8-12B in 2025. Compute in­fra­struc­ture is ob­vi­ously not cheap when serv­ing 190M peo­ple daily.

So let’s try to model their ex­pected ARPU (annual rev­enue per user) by un­der­stand­ing what OpenAI is ac­tu­ally build­ing and how it com­pares to ex­ist­ing ad plat­forms.

The ad prod­ucts they’ve con­firmed thus far:

* Ads at bot­tom of an­swers when there’s a rel­e­vant spon­sored prod­uct or ser­vice based on your cur­rent con­ver­sa­tion

Testing starts “in the com­ing weeks” for logged-in adults in the U. S. on free and Go tiers. Ads will be “clearly la­beled and sep­a­rated from the or­ganic an­swer.” Users can learn why they’re see­ing an ad or dis­miss it.

* Choice and con­trol: Users can turn off per­son­al­iza­tion and clear ad data

* Plus, Pro, Business, and Enterprise tiers won’t have ads

They also men­tioned a pos­si­bil­ity of con­ver­sa­tional ads where you can ask fol­low-up ques­tions about prod­ucts di­rectly.

Revenue tar­gets: Reports sug­gest OpenAI is tar­get­ing $1B in ad rev­enue for 2026, scal­ing to $25B by 2029, though OpenAI has­n’t con­firmed these num­bers pub­licly. We can use these as the con­ser­v­a­tive bench­mark, but know­ing the sheer prod­uct tal­ent at OpenAI, the fund­ing and hunger. I think they’re blow past this.

* Self-serve plat­form: Advertisers bid for place­ments, su­per su­per su­per likely, ex­actly what Google does, prob­a­bly their biggest rev­enue stream.

* Affiliate com­mis­sions: Built-in check­outs so users can buy prod­ucts in­side ChatGPT, OpenAI takes com­mis­sion, sim­i­lar to their Shopify col­lab.

* Sidebar spon­sored con­tent: When users ask about top­ics with mar­ket po­ten­tial, spon­sored info ap­pears in a side­bar marked “Sponsored”

Now let’s com­pare this to ex­ist­ing ad plat­forms:

* How it works: Auction-based sys­tem where ad­ver­tis­ers bid on key­words. Ads ap­pear in search re­sults based on bid + qual­ity score.

* Why it works: High in­tent (search queries) + owns the en­tire ver­ti­cal stack (ad tech, auc­tion sys­tem, tar­get­ing, decades of op­ti­miza­tion)

* Ad rev­enue: [$212.4B in ad rev­enue in the first 3 quar­ters of 2025]https://​www.de­mand­sage.com/​google-ads-sta­tis­tics/ (8.4% growth from 2024′s $273.4B)

* Google does­n’t re­port ARPU so we need to cal­cu­late it: ARPU = $296.2B (projected) ÷ 5.01B = $59.12 per user an­nu­ally.

* How it works: Auction-based pro­moted tweets in time­line. Advertisers only pay when users com­plete ac­tions (click, fol­low, en­gage).

* Why it works: Timeline en­gage­ment, CPC ~$0.18, but does­n’t own ver­ti­cal stack and does it on a smaller scale

* Intent level: High. 2.5B prompts daily in­cludes prod­uct re­search, rec­om­men­da­tions, com­par­isons. More in­tent than Meta’s pas­sive scrolling, com­pa­ra­ble to Google search.

* Scale: 1B WAU by Feb 2026, but free users only (~950M at 95% free tier).

So where should ChatGPT’s ARPU sit?

It sits with Search, not Social.

Which puts it be­tween X ($5.54) and Meta ($49.63). OpenAI has bet­ter in­tent than Meta but worse in­fra­struc­ture. They have more scale than X but no ver­ti­cal in­te­gra­tion. When a user asks ChatGPT “Help me plan a 5-day trip to Kyoto” or “Best CRM for small busi­ness,” that is High Intent. That is a Google-level query, not a Facebook-level scroll.

We al­ready have a bench­mark for this: Perplexity.

In late 2024/2025, re­ports con­firmed Perplexity was charg­ing CPMs ex­ceed­ing $50. This is com­pa­ra­ble to pre­mium video or high-end search, and miles above the ~$2-6 CPMs seen on so­cial feeds.

If Perplexity can com­mand $50+ CPMs with a smaller user base, OpenAI’s “High Agency” prod­uct team will likely floor their pric­ing there.

* 2026: $5.50 (The “Perplexity Floor”) - Even with a clumsy beta and low fill rate, high-in­tent queries com­mand pre­mium pric­ing. If they serve just one ad every 20 queries at a Perplexity-level CPM, they hit this num­ber ef­fort­lessly.

* 2027: $18.00 - The launch of a self-serve ad man­ager (like Meta/Google) al­lows mil­lions of SMBs to bid. Competition dri­ves price.

* 2028: $30.00 - This is where “Ads” be­come “Actions.” OpenAI won’t just show an ad for a flight; they will book it. Taking a cut of the trans­ac­tion (CPA model) yields 10x the rev­enue of show­ing a ban­ner.

* 2029: $50.00 (Suuuuuuuper bull­ish case) - Approaching Google’s ~$60 ARPU. By now, the in­fra­struc­ture is ma­ture, and “Conversational Commerce” is the stan­dard. This is what Softbank is pray­ing will hap­pen.

And we’re for­get­ting that OpenAI have a se­ri­ous se­ri­ous prod­uct team, I don’t doubt for once they’ll be fully ca­pa­ble of build­ing out the stack and in­te­grat­ing ads til they oc­cupy your en­tire sub­con­scious.

In fact they hired Fidji Simo as their “CEO of Applications”, a newly cre­ated role that puts her in charge of their en­tire rev­enue en­gine. Fidji is a Meta pow­er­house who spent a decade at Facebook work­ing on the Facebook App and… ads:

Leading Monetization of the Facebook App, with a fo­cus on mo­bile ad­ver­tis­ing that rep­re­sents the vast ma­jor­ity of Facebook’s rev­enue. Launched new ad prod­ucts such as Video Ads, Lead Ads, Instant Experiences, Carousel ads, etc.

Launched and grew video ad­ver­tis­ing to be a large por­tion of Facebook’s rev­enue.

But 1.5-1.8B free users by 2028? That as­sumes zero com­pe­ti­tion im­pact from any­one, cer­tainly not the loom­ing gi­ant Gemini. Unrealistic.

The main rev­enue growth comes from ARPU scal­ing not just user growth.

Crunching all the num­bers from “High Intent” model, 2026 looks dif­fer­ent.

* 35M pay­ing sub­scribers: $8.4B min­i­mum (conservatively as­sum­ing all at $20/mo Plus tier)

* Definitely higher with Pro ($200/mo) and Enterprise (custom pric­ing)

* ChatGPT does 2.5B prompts daily this is what ad­ver­tis­ers would class as both higher en­gage­ment and higher in­tent than pas­sive scrolling (although you can fit more ads in a scroll than a chat)

* Reality Check: This as­sumes they mon­e­tise typ­i­cal search queries at rates Perplexity has al­ready proven pos­si­ble.

These pro­jec­tions use fu­ture­search.ai’s base fore­cast ($39B me­dian for mid-2027, no ads) + ad­ver­tis­ing over­lay from in­ter­nal OpenAI docs + con­ser­v­a­tive user growth.

Ads were the key to un­lock­ing prof­itabil­ity, you must’ve seen it com­ing, thanks to you not skip­ping that 3 minute health in­sur­ance ad - you, yes you helped us achieve AGI!

Mission align­ment: Our mis­sion is to en­sure AGI ben­e­fits all of hu­man­ity; our pur­suit of ad­ver­tis­ing is al­ways in sup­port of that mis­sion and mak­ing AI more ac­ces­si­ble.

The A in AGI stands for Ads! It’s all ads!! Ads that you can’t even block be­cause they are BAKED into the streamed prob­a­bilis­tic word se­lec­tor pur­pose­fully skewed to out­put the high­est bid­der’s mar­ket­ing copy.

Look on the bright side, if they’re turn­ing to ads it likely means AGI is not on the hori­zon. Your job is safe!

It’s 4:41AM in London, I’m knack­ered. Idek if I’m gonna post this be­cause I love AI and do agree that some things are a nec­es­sary evil to achieve a greater goal (AGI).

Nevertheless, if you have any ques­tions or com­ments, shout me -> os­samachaib.cs@gmail.com.

“The in­cred­i­ble thing about Hardwick [new Hall] is… when you set it on the com­pass, it’s al­most ex­actly north-south,” says Ranald Lawrence, a lec­turer in ar­chi­tec­ture at the University of Liverpool in the UK. He’s also pub­lished pa­pers on Hardwick’s de­sign and ther­mal com­fort. “And,” he adds, “the whole in­ter­nal plan­ning of the [new] house is then based around that geom­e­try.”

Bess moved around the rooms, fol­low­ing the Sun’s path. Her morn­ings were spent walk­ing the 63m (200ft) east-fac­ing Long Gallery, where the bright morn­ing light hits. The af­ter­noon and evening Sun il­lu­mi­nates the south-west­ern flank of the build­ing, where Bess’ bed cham­bers were. And the dark­est, cold­est cor­ner of the house in the north-west was where the kitchens were placed, which would have been handy in keep­ing food cool and fresh.

I ex­pe­ri­ence this first hand as I walk around — the kitchens are much colder. Elena Williams, the se­nior house and col­lec­tions man­ager at The National Trust, a UK char­ity which pre­serves his­toric sites, no­tices too. “It’s a well-de­signed build­ing that is also de­signed around com­fort and that uses the nat­ural en­vi­ron­ment to do that,” she says.

It’s not just the ori­en­ta­tion that helps keep the house warm. As Williams shows me around, she points out that some of the win­dows on the north of the build­ing are ac­tu­ally “blind” or fake. She ex­plains that on the out­side, there is a win­dow, but on the in­side, it’s lined with lead and blocked up. Unlike south-fac­ing win­dows, north-fac­ing win­dows bring lit­tle ther­mal ben­e­fit, even in sum­mer, Lawrence says.

Pretty much all the fire­places I see are also built on the cen­tral spine of the build­ing, mean­ing not much heat would be lost to the win­dows or ex­te­rior wall. It’s not un­til we take a door through this spine that I re­alise that the girth of it is stag­ger­ing — 1.37m (4.5ft) thick. This is yet an­other trick to keep its in­hab­i­tants warm.