I will tell a story of amazing advances in atomic theory in the past two decades and numerous applications that grew from improved computational abilities, including atomic clock development, fundamental physics, ultracold atoms and quantum simulations, and astrophysics. This story intervenes with experimental advances in quantum control and resulting advances in measurement accuracy. I will focus on recent developments, including large-scale high-performance computing, turning research codes into software everyone can use, making all data available to the community via the data portal, and machine learning. The talk will include a brief description of new methodology developments and remaining challenges.