AICA: Italy's Computing Society

Abstract

The Associazione Italiana per l’Informatica ed il Calcolo Automatico was founded in 1961 by mathematicians and engineers from the scientific computing community that had built Italy’s first computers, at a time when Olivetti was trying to compete with IBM in mainframes. In 1966 two Italians, Corrado Böhm and Giuseppe Jacopini, proved the theorem that later served as the mathematical basis of structured programming. Olivetti’s computer business did not survive the early 1960s, and Italy’s universities have produced more research than its industry has turned into products.

Italian Computing Origins: Olivetti and the University of Pisa

Italian computing started in two places at once: at the University of Pisa and at Olivetti.

The University of Pisa built Italy’s first scientific electronic computer, the CEP (Calcolatrice Elettronica Pisana), a project suggested by Enrico Fermi in a letter of August 1954, begun in 1955, and inaugurated on November 13, 1961, in the presence of President Giovanni Gronchi. Pisa remained Italy’s leading academic computing center and in 1969 started Italy’s first degree course in computer science.

Adriano Olivetti, who had transformed his father’s typewriter company into a company known for its industrial design, launched a computing division in the late 1950s. Mario Tchou (1924–1961), a Chinese-Italian engineer who studied at the Catholic University of America and the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn and was teaching at Columbia (from 1952) when Adriano Olivetti hired him in 1955, led the development of the Elea 9003, a fully transistorized mainframe computer, announced in 1959. The Elea 9003 was one of the first fully transistorized commercial computers in the world, and the first solid-state computer designed and built in Italy.

Tchou recruited a team of young engineers and physicists. Olivetti installed Elea systems at Italian banks and companies and planned to sell them across Europe.

Adriano Olivetti died of a stroke in February 1960, and Tchou was killed in a car accident in November 1961, aged 37. The two deaths, 21 months apart, took away the project’s patron and its technical leader. General Electric acquired Olivetti’s computing division in 1964, ending Italy’s attempt to produce a world-class computing company.

Olivetti had a working, transistorized product and real customers when it lost the two people who had driven the project.

Founding: AICA, 1961

AICA was founded in this environment, shaped by the work at Pisa, Olivetti’s computers, and a wider scientific community that had begun to use computers. A promoting committee chaired by the mathematician Mauro Picone issued its call in 1960; the constitutive assembly met in Rome on December 10, 1960, and the statute was registered with a notary on February 4, 1961, the date AICA counts as its birth. Aldo Ghizzetti became the first president; the first council included Paolo Ercoli and Luigi Dadda.

The society was founded as the Associazione Italiana per il Calcolo Automatico (Italian Association for Automatic Calculation). In 1983 it added informatica to its name, becoming the Associazione Italiana per l’Informatica ed il Calcolo Automatico while keeping the acronym.

AICA joined IFIP as Italy’s national member society, which gave Italian computing researchers a formal link to the international community.

Corrado Böhm and the Structured Programming Theorem

Italy’s best-known contribution to theoretical computer science came from Corrado Böhm (1923–2017), a mathematician who did his doctorate at ETH Zürich and taught for much of his career at Sapienza University of Rome.

In 1966, Böhm and his co-author Giuseppe Jacopini published the Böhm-Jacopini theorem (also called the structured program theorem): any computable function can be expressed using only three control flow constructs: sequence, selection (if-then-else), and iteration (while loops). More technically: any flowchart program can be converted to an equivalent program using only these three constructs, without the need for arbitrary jumps (GOTO statements).

The theorem became the mathematical basis of structured programming, the methodology that Edsger Dijkstra championed with his letter “Go To Statement Considered Harmful” (1968). If any computation can be expressed without GOTO, then GOTO is unnecessary, and the restricted vocabulary of structured programming (sequence, if-then-else, while) loses nothing in expressive power.

Böhm also worked on the lambda calculus; the Böhm separation theorem and his techniques for reasoning about lambda terms are still used in theoretical computer science. He worked from the 1950s until his death in 2017 at age 94.

Italian Computing Research

Italian computing research is also strong in several other areas:

Logic programming: Italian researchers contributed to the development and implementation of Prolog and logic programming systems, building on Italy’s strong mathematical logic tradition.

Computer networks: Italian research on networking protocols, distributed systems, and internet infrastructure has been substantial. The GARR (Gruppo per l’Armonizzazione delle Reti della Ricerca), Italy’s national research network, similar to Internet2 in the US, was built with significant Italian computing research contributions.

Computer vision and image processing: Italian research groups, particularly at Pisa and the University of Bologna, have made significant contributions to computer vision and pattern recognition.

Human-computer interaction: Italian HCI research, connected to the strong Italian design culture, has contributed to interaction design and usability research.

AICA Programs

AICA operates primarily as a professional society and educational organization rather than a research conference organizer:

Annual congress: Almost every year AICA holds a national congress in a different Italian city; since 1985 it has also organized DIDAMATICA, an annual conference on computing in education.

ECDL/ICDL in Italy: AICA administers the ICDL (International Computer Driving Licence) program in Italy, the basic digital literacy certification used by millions of workers and students. It is AICA’s largest program outside the research community.

Prizes and competitions: AICA awards thesis prizes, among them the Premio Mario Tchou for work on ICT and economic development and the ETIC prizes on ethics and information technology (with Rotary districts), and it runs the Italian Olympiad in Informatics for secondary-school students on behalf of the Ministry of Education.

Olivetti’s Legacy and Italian Industry

After selling its computing division to General Electric in 1964, Olivetti continued in business machines and office technology. In 1965, Olivetti put into production the Programma 101 (P101), designed by a team under Pier Giorgio Perotto, one of the first commercial desktop programmable calculators and often described as an early “all-in-one” desktop computer (the Mathatronics Mathatron appears to have reached the market earlier). The P101 ran stored programs, printed its results on a built-in printer, and sold both to businesses and to NASA (about ten units, used to plan the Apollo 11 landing). The P101 predates HP’s first programmable desktop calculator (the 9100A, 1968) by three years.

Olivetti made another computing attempt in the 1980s under CEO Carlo De Benedetti, acquiring stakes in various European technology companies and attempting to build a European computing giant through acquisition rather than organic development. This strategy produced a collection of companies without a coherent technology vision and was eventually unwound.

Olivetti as a technology company ceased to exist through a series of mergers and acquisitions in the 1990s and 2000s, ultimately becoming part of the Telecom Italia group and losing its distinct identity. Olivetti survives as a TIM subsidiary selling printers, cash registers, and IT services. The potential that the Elea 9003 represented (an Italian competitor to IBM mainframes) was never recaptured.

Modern AICA

Italian computing faces problems that AICA shares with many national societies: strong research at the universities, little of it turned into competitive companies, and a steady loss of engineers to American and Northern European firms.

Italy’s academic computing is internationally recognized: Italian researchers publish in top ACM and IEEE venues, Italian universities appear in computing research rankings, and individual Italian researchers have achieved international distinction. AICA connects these researchers with one another and with Italian practitioners.