(CNN) -- Long before there was Apple there was Olivetti.
With its slick, beautifully designed products at the cutting edge of innovation, the Italian company was once at the forefront of the race to produce a personal computer for mass consumption.
The Ivrea based manufacturer spent years honing the design of its typewriters, calculators and adding machines, agonising over everything from the position of the keys to the shape of the space bar.
And everyone from Cormac McCarthy to Bob Dylan used an Olivetti typewriter to bang out some of the world's best known novels and songs.
While the company has never recovered its leading position, a humble start-up aims to put Ivrea back on the world innovation and design map.
Open-source hardware
Called Arduino, after the local bar where the five founders met to discuss their project, the company produces simple open-source electronics platforms that allows enthusiasts and professionals to build interactive projects.
Now, almost ten years after the company produced its first single-board microcontroller, more than 700,000 are in the hands of hobbyists and professionals, operating everything from drones and robots to lights and motors.
Co-founder David Cuartielles told CNN that Arduino is not only an educational tool, but also a way of exploring new ideas with new people.
"It's been an emerging phenomenon since the late 1990s," Cuartielles said. "Different schools around the world have tried to bring electronics to designers and artists to get them to come up with more creative uses for technology."
Arduino boards also have a distinctive and striking design, in recognition of which they will go on display at MoMA in New York in 2015.
Olivetti roots
Operating from a part of the old Olivetti building in Ivrea, Arduino stamps out the blue microprocessors which operate under a form of open source that allows amateurs, designers and artists to come up with new uses for the circuit board.
http://edition.cnn.com/2014/11/26/tech/innovation/make-create-innovate-arduino-cuartielles/index.html
