FOS Future Lab: How 1960s Italy built tomorrow — and made it beautiful

Birds of a feather

The Maserati Tipo 60/61 ‘Birdcage’ was developed between 1959 and 1961. Its chassis was the work of engineer Giulio Alfieri, who welded together roughly 200 small-diameter steel tubes into an intricate lattice — the ‘birdcage’ for which the car was named.

The whole structure weighed barely 30 kilograms, yet it was stiff enough to race wheel-to-wheel with far bigger machinery, and it did so right through the early 1960s. It’s as much engineering excellence as it is a sculpture, and would have brought FOS Future Lab to a standstill.

Reverting to type

Alfieri's instinct, that the way a thing is built can be as thrilling as what it does, ran right through Italian industry in those years. Nowhere more so than at a typewriter company in the northern town of Ivrea.

In 1959, Olivetti unveiled the Elea 9003, one of the first commercial computers in the world built entirely from transistors rather than hot, fragile valves. The engineering was led by Mario Tchou, a brilliant young Italian of Chinese descent. The machine's appearance — cabinets you could walk between, a console tiled like a mosaic — was the work of a then-emerging designer named Ettore Sottsass, who won Italy's coveted Compasso d'Oro design award for it.

Then came the showstopper. In 1965, Olivetti launched the Programma 101, invented by engineer Pier Giorgio Perotto and nicknamed the "Perottina." Its industrial design fell to a thirty-something Mario Bellini, later one of the great names of the century.

About the size and weight of a typewriter, it sat on an ordinary desk, ran programs from magnetic cards, and is widely regarded as the first desktop personal computer, arriving a full decade before Silicon Valley had the idea.

To grasp why that mattered, picture what a computer was in 1965: a room. Businesses rented time on machines the size of a wardrobe, tended by specialists in white coats, and ordinary people never went near one. The Programma 101 put that power on a single desk, for a single user, at a price a company could actually justify.

It was, in every meaningful sense, personal, and the word we would later bolt onto the whole revolution. An Italian typewriter firm got there first.

The machine that helped the Moon landing

Here is the detail that ought to make every FOS Future Lab visitor stop. When NASA needed to crunch the numbers for Apollo 11, it bought ten Programma 101s and used them to help calculate trajectories, fuel loads and the lunar module's landing time.

So, an Italian desktop computer the size of a briefcase helped put human beings on the Moon, which brings the story neatly up to date.

Apollo proved we could reach the Earth’s only natural satellite; this year's FOS Future Lab ‘Return to the Moon’ zone was all about the far harder job of going back to stay. We met the Airbus engineers building the European Service Module that powers NASA's Orion spacecraft, whose programme motto is bluntly ambitious — "this time to stay".

We tracked Artemis II all the way to the first crewed loop around the Moon in more than 50 years. For co-curator Sir Tim Peake, the clear goal this time isn't a flag-planting race, it’s to establish a permanent lunar base as a research laboratory.

A few steps away sat a rocket engine bound for Mars, fresh from Pulsar Fusion's first plasma firing and promising to halve the journey to the red planet on grams of fuel rather than tonnes. A touchscreen let families fly the Artemis II mission themselves, built by a studio that turns rocket science into playable animation.

Nearby, on the far side of the New Frontiers zone, Deep revealed how the ocean becomes a proving ground for space as aquanauts graduate to astronauts. And we highlighted how careers-in-space continue to press a point Perotto proved long ago: the final frontier needs coders, designers and animators as much as astronauts.

The future Italy let slip

There's a melancholy coda to the Olivetti story. Adriano Olivetti, the visionary boss who bet the company on electronics, died suddenly in 1960. A year later, Mario Tchou was killed in a motorway crash, aged just 37 — a loss so abrupt a folklore of foul play still clings to it, though nothing has ever been proven.

Without them, Olivetti's electronics division was sold to America’s General Electric, and Italy's remarkable lead in computing simply evaporated. The country that arguably invented the personal computer handed the future to someone else.

If there's a reason a place like FOS Future Lab exists, it's buried in that sentence. New frontiers have to be championed, funded and shown to the next generation before they slip away.

Four more exhibits

Olivetti wouldn't have had the hall to itself. A FOS Future Lab of the 1960s could have filled a wing with Italian firsts. There would be the concrete of Pier Luigi Nervi, the engineer whose thin, sweeping domes for the 1960 Rome Olympics — like the Palazzetto dello Sport — made engineering beautiful.

There would be a slice of the space programme, too. In 1964, with the launch of San Marco 1, Italy became the third nation able to put a satellite into orbit with its own launch team — after only the Soviet Union and the United States. The work of aerospace pioneer Luigi Broglio, he would later run his launches from a converted oil platform off the coast of Kenya.

The Brionvega Doney of 1962 was Europe's first fully transistorised portable set, designed by Marco Zanuso and Richard Sapper using the same kind of transistors then going into missile guidance systems, and another Compasso d'Oro winner.

Parked by the FOS Future Lab door would inevitably be a Vespa, the focus of celebrations during the 2026 Revival’s Track Opening Parade. The 1946 scooter had an aeronautical engineer, Corradino D'Ascanio, and was built like a small aircraft, with a load-bearing monocoque body in place of a motorcycle's exposed frame. Aviation thinking, applied to urban life.

While this year’s Goodwood Revival looks back a hundred years to Maserati’s origins, FOS Future Lab spends its days looking forward to the Moon and beyond. What connects them is a very Italian idea from a very Italian decade: that frontiers are worth chasing, and that it ought to be beautiful when you get there.

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Main image photography by Drew Gibson.

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