In this web quest I will be writing about the way computers have changed the world, how they have helped and have not helped us. Computers have advanced a lot since the 1900’s. If you ask a person back 100 years ago what a computer is they wouldn’t know. Now we have so many different types of computers: flat, wide, and even touch screens. They are very helpful when it comes to a work place and school because us teenagers have to do projects and research papers. Sometimes they aren’t helpful because teenagers use them for bad things for as well as adults do to. A computer is a machine for manipulating data according to a list of instructions - a program. Computers can be extremely versatile. In fact, they are universal information processing machines. Originally, the term "computer" referred to a person who performed numerical calculations under the direction of a mathematician. The history of the modern computer begins with two separate technologies, automated calculation and programmability, but no single device can be identified as the earliest computer, partly because of the inconsistent application of that term. A few devices are worth mentioning though, like some mechanical aids to computing, which were very successful and survived for centuries until the advent of the electronic calculator, like the Sumerian abacus, designed around 2500 BC[4] of which a descendant won a speed competition against a modern desk calculating machine in Japan in 1946,[5] the slide rules, invented in the 1620s, which were carried on five Apollo space missions, including to the moon[6] and arguably the astrolabe and the Antikythera mechanism, an ancient astronomical computer built by the Greeks around 80 BC.[7] The Greek mathematician Hero of Alexandria (c. 10–70 AD) built a mechanical theater which performed a play lasting 10 minutes and was operated by a complex system of ropes and drums that might be considered to be a means of deciding which parts of the mechanism performed which actions and when.[8] This is the essence of programmability.