Amazon Fresh stores offer a refreshing change of pace

I recently went to my first Amazon Fresh store. I walked in, selected stuff and left. No checkout necessary.

As I walked in the door, I had a choice of “just walk out shopping” or the traditional kind. To use “just walk out,” I was shown how to use either the Amazon app or an Amazon credit card. When I stuck my credit card in the turnstile, its screen flashed green and said “Go.” Everyone else must have been using “just walk out” too, because there were four checkers just standing around looking bored.

The store looks like a combination of Whole Foods and a regular supermarket, though I also saw Amazon’s “Happy Belly” brand, especially in the spice department. I expected an emailed receipt as soon as I walked out the door, but had to check my credit card transactions instead.

So far, Amazon has 38 locations in the U.S. and 17 in London, with more coming soon.

ENIAC WASN’T FIRST

Everyone knows that ENIAC, built in 1945, was the world’s first computer. But actually, the first digital computer was invented in 1937 by John Atanasoff at Iowa State University.

I got interested in this topic after being invited to a screening of a film about Atanasoff at Illinois’ Augustana College. Since that was inconvenient, I rented the movie “Atanasoff, Father of the Computer” for $3 online. It’s hugely entertaining if you like computer history.

Until Atanasoff came along, no one had designed logic circuits that took data inputs and produced logical outputs that could be stored in memory. Atanasoff got the idea in 1937 as an assistant professor at Iowa State University. His physics students were taking too long to finish their calculations, typically a month or more. That bugged him.

Unl i ke ENIAC, the Atanasoff-Berry Computer (ABC) was the size of a desk and cost $ 5,000 to build. ENIAC took up a whole room and cost $ 200,000, the equivalent, according to MeasuringWorth, of about $4 million today. John Mauchley, ENIAC’s co-inventor, denied that he copied the ABC after getting access to the inventor’s notebooks. But in 1971, a federal district court ruled that he had. That meant he no longer had an enforceable patent. What’s more, Iowa State had turned down Atanasoff’s request for one decades before. So Apple, IBM and others were free to copy. The computer revolution was born.

Atanasoff didn’t get the $4 billion his patent was worth, but his wife said “let’s just enjoy the rest of our lives,” and so they did. Before he died at age 92 in 1995, he received some of the recognition he deserved. But most people still think ENIAC was first.

OUT OF SPACE

If you’re running out of space for photos on your iPhone, iPad or Android, consider installing the Amazon Photos app on your mobile device or computer. Prime members get free unlimited photo backup online.

With Prime, even if you delete all the pictures on your tablet, phone or desktop, you’ll still have them in the Amazon cloud, ready to download again. After installing the app on your phone, every photo you take will automatically appear in Amazon Photos. If you give up your Prime membership to avoid paying the $139 yearly fee, you’ll have 180 days to move your excess photos to another storage location. As a non- member, you’ll still get five gigabytes of storage space and can pay $2 a month to get 100 gigabytes or $7 a month for a terabyte.

As for videos, Prime members get five gigabytes of free storage, plus another five for any videos you take with the Amazon Fire tablet. It’s $2 a month for 100 gigabytes

worth of videos.

OPT-OUT TUESDAYS

Every Tuesday, tech columnist Kim Komando shows you how to opt out of websites that store your name, address and other info. Search “Komando Opt Out Tuesday” to get started.

Of course, strangers can still pay to get your info. A friend of mine paid $30 to have public records checked after meeting a guy on the Elite Singles dating service. They’re happily married now.

CHATGPT FOR BUSINESS

We’ve heard a lot about ChatGPT and Bing AI for individuals, but businesses can make their own versions to serve customers.

Recently, a company called Gupshup created the Autobot Builder, which is based on ChatGPT-3. It creates a private version of the chatty search engine. But instead of drawing on the internet for data, it uses a company’s catalogs, records, databases and so on. That way it can text back-and-forth with customers like a genius salesperson.

For example, Tata Cliq, a retail company, allowed Autobot Builder to create a new version of WhatsApp, a popular, free texting-and-phoning service. With product recommendations based on browsing history, abandoned cart follow- ups and price drop alerts for wish-listed products, the company’s return on investment was 10 times higher on high-volume days like Black Friday than it was in its other channels. See more information at Gupshup.io.

INTERNUTS

■ FlightAware.com gives you early warnings about your flight. It could have told me that a delay would make me miss my connecting flight.

■ Neal.fun is a fun website. Click “Wonders of Street” to see Google street views of things like a sculpture in Singapore of a baby that seems to float in the air, a supposed three-legged man and a fence in Poland made of 6-foot-high colored pencils.