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Dr. Rudolph Bovensiepen established the Alpina company in 1949 in Kaufbeuren, a small town in Bavaria in southern Germany. The company's main business was with a range of portable typewriters that achieved a very solid reputation. In 1958 engineer Oskar Mildner completed a hand-built prototype of a miniature calculating machine. The machine entered mass production in 1960, but suffered from early manufacturing problems and was unable to compete with the well-established Curta. Only about 4000 Alpina calculators were built, and many remained unsold when production ended in 1961. The typewriter business was also in trouble, and was sold at about the same time. Typewriter production at Kaufbeuren ended in 1963.
It appears that the factory itself remained with the Bovensiepen family, for in 1965 the founder's son Burkard started a BMW tuning business at the same address and under the same Alpina name. Alpina is still a family-owned company, and is still very much in business as a manufacturer of high-performance BMW conversions.
Alpina Automobiles expanded rapidly and left the Kaufbeuren site in 1970. Oskar Mildner returned to the factory, restored the calculator machinery (which had sat idle for nine years), and produced a further 1600 machines. The last Alpina calculator (No. 6840) was made in 1971.
