The word used to mean craft, not gadgets
Technology comes from the Greek tekhnē, meaning craft or skill, joined to the ending we use for the study of something. For most of its life the word meant roughly 'the systematic study of how things are made' — it would have covered pottery and shipbuilding quite comfortably. Only in the last century did it narrow to mean electronics, and only in the last thirty years did it come to mean, for most people, a SCREEN.
That drift is worth noticing, because a lot of what sits in this grid is craft in the older sense: someone worked out how to make a CIRCUIT small enough, a BATTERY light enough, a WIRELESS link reliable enough. The clever part is rarely the idea. It is the making.
Two thousand transistors, then twenty billion
The first general-purpose chip you could buy, Intel's 4004 in 1971, held about 2,300 transistors — the tiny switches every COMPUTER is built from. The processor in a current SMARTPHONE holds somewhere around twenty billion. That is not an improvement; it is roughly ten million times more, in the space of one working lifetime.
Gordon Moore spotted the pattern early. In 1965 he noticed the number of components on a chip was doubling at a steady rate and guessed it would carry on, which it did for about fifty years and became known as Moore's Law. Nothing else in engineering has behaved like that. A car is not ten million times faster than a 1971 car, and this is why a GADGET that felt magical a decade ago now feels slow.
How quickly people picked it up
The other half of the story is adoption. The telephone took about seventy-five years to reach a hundred million users. The mobile phone managed it in under twenty. Some apps have done it in months — which means the gap between a thing being invented and being everywhere has collapsed from a lifetime to less than a school year.
That speed is why the vocabulary in this grid changes so fast. To DOWNLOAD something, to be on a NETWORK, to keep files on a SERVER: none of these were everyday words for a child a generation ago, and a few of them will sound quaint to the next one. It is also why a WEBCAM went from novelty to ordinary to essential inside about fifteen years.
Software and hardware are two halves of one trick
The single most useful idea for making sense of all this is the split between HARDWARE — the physical parts you could drop on your foot — and SOFTWARE, the instructions that tell them what to do. It is what lets one identical LAPTOP or TABLET be a drawing board, a cinema and a till, without a screwdriver going anywhere near it. Change the PROGRAM and you have changed the machine.
Look closer and the two keep meeting. A phone carries more than a dozen kinds of SENSOR — measuring tilt, light, pressure, magnetic direction — and each is a piece of hardware that only becomes useful once software knows what to ask it. The sub-topics in this category split along the same seam: our computers and gadgets puzzles cover the physical side, from the KEYBOARD and MOUSE to the CHARGER; coding, operating systems and artificial intelligence cover the instructions; and the internet and cybersecurity cover what happens once the two start talking to strangers.