Apple is reaching more people in more ways than ever before, so like many companies, trade shows have become a very minor part of how Apple reaches its customers. The increasing popularity of Apple’s Retail Stores, which more than 3.5 million people visit every week, and the Apple.com website enable Apple to directly reach more than a hundred million customers around the world in innovative new ways.

Apple has been steadily scaling back on trade shows in recent years, including NAB, Macworld New York, Macworld Tokyo and Apple Expo in Paris.

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Apple ignited the personal computer revolution in the 1970s with the Apple II and reinvented the personal computer in the 1980s with the Macintosh. Today, Apple continues to lead the industry in innovation with its award-winning computers, OS X operating system and iLife and professional applications. Apple is also spearheading the digital media revolution with its iPod portable music and video players and iTunes online store, and has entered the mobile phone market with its revolutionary iPhone.

Spring: http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2008/12/16macworld.html

Remember the Amazon Tax? Back in April, the New York State legislature passed a bill requiring Amazon to collect taxes from New York State residents even though it doesn’t have a physical presence in the state (the normal requirement for retailers). The state got around the physical presence requirement by counting affiliates as part of Amazon. Amazon (and Overstock) filed lawsuits seeking summary judgment against the State of the New York. Yesterday, a New York State judge dismissed those lawsuits, potentially throwing the case into the Court of Appeals.

The question, though, is not whether Amazon should collect New York State taxes. It would be trivial for Amazon to do so during the checkout process for residents of New York. (Update: In fact, it’s been doing so since the law was passed last summer). The real issue is the way the law gets Amazon to do so by dragging its affiliates into it. As I wrote before, this sets a bad precedent:

The law, as written, is just a bad law. And it would set a dangerous precedent. Not because New York State shouldn’t try to collect the $50 million in estimated uncollected sales taxes owed to it. But because the law is tortuous in the way it attempts to do that.

A marketing affiliate is not part of Amazon. If I put some Amazon book recommendations on the side of TechCrunch , set up an affiliate account, and readers click through and buy those books, that does not make TechCrunch part of Amazon. It is a marketing arrangement. Just like someone who sets up an AdSense account does not work for Google.

You can expect more states to try similar ways to tax online retailers as their overall budgets shrink. And you can also expect affiliate marketing programs that have served to grease the wheels of e-commerce become more restrictive. For instance, one solution for Amazon would simply be to cut off affiliate partners just before they hit $10,000 in sales, the minimum threshold stipulated in the New York law. But you see where this will lead—to less overall e-commerce sales and a drop in the massive New York State budget.

Spring: http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/01/13/new-york-court-dismisses-amazons-objections-to-paying-state-taxes/

But if truth be told the computer has had a long and honourable history that stretches back to the closing years of the World War II.

And, say conservations and computer history enthusiasts, Britain played a big part in the development of the modern computer.

“The layman when asked about the introduction of steam power will usually reel off Newcomen, Watt and Trevithick,” said Chris Burton, of the Computer Conservation Society.

“But when it comes to computer pioneers they are absolutely baffled,” he said. “They have no idea.”

Foundational work

When pushed, he said, they might be able to remember the name of Alan Turing but few know of any others beyond that.

Turing established the conceptual and philosophical basis for the rise of computers in a seminal 1936 paper called “On Computable Numbers”. But it took a large cast of engineers and scientists to solve the real world problems that arise when those ideas are turned into whirring, clicking reality.

At Bletchley Park forerunners of modern computers were built to help the Allies crack German codes.

Colossus was crucial for D-Day operations

Although Turing worked at Bletchley and helped create the Bombe that cracked messages enciphered with Enigma machines he had little to do with Colossus – a programmable machine that tackled the encrypted messages sent by the German High Command.

Conceived, designed and built by Tommy Flowers, Allen Coombs and Max Newman, the first Colossus was working in 1943 – three years ahead of the rival pioneering American machine known as Eniac.

For a long time the Electronic Numerical Integrator And Computer (Eniac) was better known than Colossus because the Official Secrets Act prevented those that worked on it talking publicly about their achievements.

Kevin Murrell, a trustee for the National Museum of Computing where a rebuilt Colossus is housed, said Bletchley was just one of the locations where the UK’s computer pioneers did their influential work.

Colossus, he said, amounted to about one-third of all effort being put into those early machines. Similar pioneering efforts were underway at Manchester and Cambridge.

Cakes and computers

At Cambridge, Maurice Wilkes and his colleagues were working on the Electronic Delay Storage Automatic Calculator (Edsac) – another recognisably modern machine that used tubes of mercury five feet in length as a data storage medium.

Edsac ran its first programs in 1949 and was developed to act as the heart of a number crunching service for Cambridge scientists.

Some principles of computing date from Victorian times.

The creation of Edsac was backed by baking and catering giant J Lyons which bought a copy of the finished machine and turned it into the world’s first business computer – the Lyons Electronic Office (Leo).

“It was the first programmable computer that went into routine operation,” said science writer Georgina Ferry, author of a book about the genesis of Leo.

“What was innovative about Leo was not the hardware,” she said, “but the systems and the way they used it.”

John Pinkerton, David Caminer, Ernest Lenaerts, Derek Hemy and others at Lyons pioneered the use of computers in the dull repetitive tasks formerly carried out by legions of clerks. One of its first roles was to calculate how much each worker at the hundreds of Lyons tearooms was to be paid.

Steadily more and more of those basic tasks were studied by Caminer and his team and broken down into steps Leo could replicate. In the process Caminer and his colleagues created systems engineering.

“Leo led the world in business computing,” she said.

Big baby

At the University of Manchester engineers such as Tom Kilburn, Freddie Williams, Geoff Tootill, Alec Robinson, Dai Edwards and others worked to create what became the Small Scale Experimental Machine (SSEM) or Baby.

The Baby was recognisably modern electronic computer because it could easily be re-programmed to carry out different tasks. By contrast older machines either just carried out one function or had to be re-wired to change what they did.

A replica of the original Baby now resides at the Museum of Science and Industry in Manchester.

“When we wrote the proposal to build the replica machine an explicit goal which was to re-run the first program as a tangible tribute to the pioneers that brought this about,” said Chris Burton who led the effort to re-build the SSEM.

Mr Burton said none of them had any idea about the influence their work would have.

“They did it to help engineers, forecasters and scientists to do their calculations,” he said. “They had no idea of the fantastic proliferation that we have had since.”

Spring: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7521868.stm