Introducing the company and design house behind your everyday office supplies – that built the first desktop computer. And why its typewriters and calculators were the iPhones and iPads of their day.

Today, Italian company Olivetti is primarily a manufacturer of the kind of things you tend to ignore, but use regularly on a day-to-day basis. Things like office printers, or electronic cash registers, or “handwritten biometric signature devices”. In short, it’s hardly Apple.

However, this current state of affairs belies the brand’s rich heritage (and core ethos) of innovation. It may seem odd to think it now, but its products, which included typewriters, calculators and, in 1965, the world’s very first desktop computer, were pretty much the iPods and iPads of their time.

Mr Adriano Olivetti, the son of the company’s founder Mr Camillo Olivetti and the man who steered it through much of the 20th century, was a visionary. Like Mr Steve Jobs after him, he recognised that good design could have both an emotional and practical impact on the way his customers and employees lived and worked. That is, he recognised that design was not just about functionality, but feelings, too.

Thus he joined forces with the likes of Mr Ettore Sottsass (the maverick designer who went on to launch iconoclastic design group Memphis, and designed 1969’s red plastic “Valentine” typewriter), modernist architecture practice BBPR (which created a now much-coveted collection of office furniture for Olivetti in 1962), and legendary graphic designer Mr Milton Glaser (who art-directed surreal advertising campaigns for Olivetti in the 1960s and 1970s).

In fact, Mr Olivetti didn’t want to stop with the products: realising the importance of a beautiful working environment, he asked internationally renowned architects to design his showrooms and factories, and even got interested in town planning, financing the redevelopment of Olivetti’s home town Ivrea. (He later became mayor of the town, and in 1960 published a book about his utopian ideas for improved community living, Città dell’Uomo. What a guy.)

Opening today at London’s ICA, new exhibition Olivetti: Beyond Form and Function is a fitting tribute to Mr Olivetti’s adventures in design, a collection of photographs, films and other objects that bring alive the pioneering principles of the company in the 1960s and 1970s. It’s worth a look, not just for fans of typewriters (because there are obviously so many of you out there), but anyone interested in the brave, space-age and thoroughly utopian spirit of the period.

Olivetti: Beyond Form And Function is on at the ICA, London, until 17 July