The 17th Century: The Invention of the First "Computers" The devices often considered the first "computers" in our understanding were rather calculators than the sophisticated combination of hard- and software we call computers today. In 1642 Blaise Pascal, the son of a French tax collector, developed a device to perform additions. His numerical wheel calculator was a brass rectangular box and used eight movable dials to add sums up to eight figures long. Designed to help his father with his duties, the big disadvantage of the Pascaline was its limitation to addition. Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz, a German mathematician and philosopher, in 1694 improved the Pascaline by creating a machine that could also multiply. As its predecessor Leibniz's mechanical multiplier likewise worked by a system of gears and dials. Leibniz also formulated a model that may be considered the theoretical ancestor of some modern computers. In De Arte Combinatoria (1666) Leibniz argued that all reasoning, all discover, verbal or not, is reducible to an ordered combination of elements, such as numbers, words, colors, or sounds. Further improvements in the field of early computing devices were made by Charles Xavier Thomas de Colmar, a Frenchmen. His arithometer could not only add and multiply, but perform the four basic arithmetic functions and was widely used up until the First World War.

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Celera Celera is an American company dedicated to the full sequencing and exploitation of the humane genome according to private business criteria. The company whose slogan is "Speed matters", is run by the Vietnam veteran Craig Ventor, whose declarations and business practices have given rise to widespread criticism. Unlike the Humane Genome Project, which is mapping the entire genome, Dr Ventor's method focuses on the genome information contained in messenger molecules. In keeping with Celera's slogan, this allows a much faster sequencing rate. The aggressive manoeuvring of Celera, coupled with Dr Ventor's unchecked self-esteem which lead him to compare himself to Nobel Prize winners, has meant that Dr. Ventor has been ostracised within the scientific community. James Watson, the co-discoverer of DNA, refers to Dr. Ventor's fast but relatively crude results as work that "any monkey could do" (source: BBC) http://www.celera.com

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