Mario Tchou was the director of the working group that at the end of the 50s of the last century gave life to theELEA 9003, the first commercial computer entirely based on transistors.
Tchou, born in Rome in 1924, is a young Italian engineer of Chinese origin, with a master's degree from the Polytechnic of the University of New York, when at the age of only 28 he was assigned a chair in the Columbia University at the industrial electronics department.
THE MEETING WITH ADRIANO OLIVETTI
In 1954, at the American headquarters of Olivetti, he met Adriano Olivetti in person.
The latter is increasingly convinced that electronics applied to computing and business are destined to completely disrupt the future world, and that therefore his company, also by natural vocation, must contribute to its development.
Adriano then proposes to the young engineer to return to Italy and take over the direction of Olivetti's activities in this sector. Thus was born the program to build the first Italian computer, the ELEA project (Automatic Electronic Computer), which deliberately recalls in the acronym the school of Elea of the philosopher Parmenides.
The project of the first Italian computer was born as a 'joint venture' with the University of Pisa which, at the suggestion of Enrico Fermi, had allocated non-negligible resources to the development of a computer, and which was looking for an industrial partner to contribute to the project from both a financial and technological-industrial point of view.
THE FIRST PROTOTYPES
Mario Tchou personally conducts hundreds of interviews to hire the engineers, mathematicians and physicists needed to staff the laboratory, favoring the youngest and most enthusiastic candidates in the selection.
After just two years in 1957, the group created the "zero machine", theELEA 9001: a prototype with thermionic valves, with a germanium transistor part to manage the memory, which was used in the Olivetti factory in Ivrea to automate warehouse management.
At the end of 1957 the group releases theELEA 9002, which is still tube based but also employs silicon transistors for memory management. port
ELEA 9003 - THE FIRST COMMERCIAL COMPUTER BASED ON TRANSISTOR TECHNOLOGY
The following year Tchou, in agreement with Roberto Olivetti, transfers the group's activities from Pisa to the outskirts of Milan, in a context presumably more favorable to the development of industrial activities.
In 1958 theELEA 9003, the first commercial computer entirely based on transistor technology, a machine that was unrivaled at the time.
It could run up to three programs simultaneously and had a computing power of 8000 instructions per second.
The ELEA 9003 is designed by Ettore Sottsass and it is still considered today a masterpiece of industrial design.
The ELEA 9003 was programmable in machine language and did not have an operating system. Nonetheless in terms of design and technology it was the most advanced commercial machine in those years: in fact it was produced in 40 specimens which were mostly absorbed by large companies (they seem few today, but for the time there were many).
For the production of an ELEA 9003, 300 very reliable transistors and diodes were required for each machine, which led Olivetti to create the SGS (General Semiconductor Company), in cooperation with Telettra.
SGS will later become the STMicroelectronics, still a world leader in chip manufacturing.
From the work of Tchou and his boys, Olivetti's world record in numerical control machines also originated, which he will give life following the creation of the OCN (Olivetti Numerical Control).
A SUSPECTED DEATH
On November 9, 1961, the car Mario Tchou was in crashes into a van on the Milan-Turin motorway, and Mario is killed.
Many thought and still think that that death was not accidental, but is attributable to the American services.
The fact is that, thanks to the death of Adriano Olivetti and an industrial crisis of the company, and also due to considerable 'political' pressures, the electronics division was sold in 1964 to General Electric.
As Tchou's wife later declared: "One thing is certain. His death and that of Adriano led, in a short time, to the divestment of the Olivetti Electronics Division, the flagship of our country, which was quickly sold to General Electric. That was a conspiracy, all industrial and financial, aimed at weakening Olivetti and Italy and doing the Americans a favor ".
We thank for the contribution PAOLO RICCARDO FELICIOLI