2.     USENET—Bulletin board system comprised of newsgroups. A group of graduate students put the system into service in 1980.

4.     MARCONI—Italian electrical engineer who successfully sent wireless signals over a distance of 1.5 miles in 1895. He later transmitted signals across the English Channel (1899) and the Atlantic (1901). Along with Karl Ferdinand Braun, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1909.

6.     FEEDHORN—A component on a satellite dish that captures a reflected signal and directs it into an amplifier.

7.     LIDAR—A device that emits pulsed laser light instead of microwaves to detect distant objects and their locations.

8.     SLEEP—Mode in which in a device or program is suspended but not terminated.

12.  ETHERNET—A system for connecting computer systems and exchanging data between them via coaxial, fiber optic, or twisted-pair cables.

13.   GODDARD—American physicist (1882–1945) who fired the first liquid-fuel rocket on March 16, 1926. During the 2.5-s flight, the small rocket shot 41¢ in the air and landed 184¢ away in a frozen cabbage field in Auburn, MA. He also patented the oscillator tube, developed the prototype of the bazooka, and launched a liquid-fuel rocket that moved faster than the speed of sound.

15.   SUITSAT—Nickname for the Russian Orlan spacesuit released from the International Space Station on February 3, 2006. It included a radio transmitter and sensors for monitoring battery power and temperature. Before it stopped transmitting, amateur radio operators were able to listen in on the suit with ham radios and police scanners.

16.   SMS—Service for sending and receiving short text messages with cell phones.

1.     EXABYTE—Approximately 1 quintillion bytes.

3.     ENIAC—Unveiled in 1946 at the University of Pennsylvania, this 30-ton computer included approximately 18,000 radio tubes and fit in a 30¢ × 50¢ room. It was used by the U.S. military until 1945.

5.    PODCAST—A transfer of audio or video files (usually MP3 or AAC) over the Internet. Today, more and more media outlets are offering this technology to subscribers.

8.     SONAR—A method for detecting objects, especially those under water, with sound waves.

9.     PETABYTE—1 quadrillion bytes.

10.   COLOSSUS—Designed by the British engineer Tommy Flowers (1905–1998), this computing machine was used by British codebreakers during World War II to read messages that had been encrypted with the Lorenz cipher.

11.   ASTERISK—The character used in schematics to signify active-low signals and pins.

13.   GOTO—Instruction in COBOL, Fortran, BASIC, C, and numerous other programming languages that causes a jump or transfer to another point in a program.

14.   ASIMO—The first humanoid robot to walk as a human does. Built by engineers at Honda Motor Co., the robot can walk forward, backward, turn, and move up and down stairs. It was inducted into the Robot Hall of Fame at Carnegie Mellon University in 2004.