Archimede italian ad.

[nicolagiacobbe]

I have found this paper ad for the archimedes in Italy, I think it dates from before the Olivetti takeover.

[DarkLord]

I think it dates from before the Olivetti takeover

Grande Nicola! Che "Ricordi"!

Some clarifications:

1) Olivetti purchased a large portion of Acorn's share before the Archimedes project was announced
2) At the same time, Olivetti also purchased a portion of Thomson's share in France (this is a related because both the un-sold 8 bits of these two companies will be rebranded and sold under the Olivetti Protest brand)
3) Olivetti commercialized only Acorn 8-bits in Italy, most likely because of the AT&T take over Olivetti itself, for which Olivetti was forced to "focus" only on the PC market, this is also probably why Olivetti re-branded the Acorn Master Compact "PC 128 S" and the Thomson MO6 "PC 128" (note the PC in front and created the Olivetti Protest sub-brand)
4) Both the 2 8bits were commercialized in Italy during the 1986, one year before Acorn announced the Archimedes, which means that the agreements, the re-branding and the ROM changes for both the 8 bit must have happened during 1985 at the latest date.

Ricordi, took the import of the Acorn Archimedes, because, IIRC, they were interested in the school market, but the machine was way too expensive and had no software in Italian and Italy did not have an official school program for having computers in schools. Later such a thing manifested in multiple forms and pretty much every school went for IBM compatible PCs.

So, Ricordi abandoned the Archimedes pretty fast, IIRC already in 1989/1990 it was taken over by Spem Srl (in Turin), for which the amazing Guido Masoero (famous in Italy already for the Sinclair QL and the ZX Spectrum) did a great job and also created a zine for us Archie users.

Hope this helps somehow,

[nicolagiacobbe]

I stand corrected, I didn't know that the Olivetti takeover was a such convoluted and complicated history. I still remember Masoero too, it was one of the few references for the Acorn world in Italy.

[paolo.baerlocher]

Thank you for remembering Guido Masoero and the SPEM shop in Torino. When I was a teenager, about 35 years ago, my father bought my Sinclair QL and later my Archimedes A310 in this shop. What a wonderful memory for me !

I love the RICORDI document too.

Grazie mille.

Paolo