Printed Page 265

After World War II, the United States entered the Cold War against the Soviet Union, pitting the two great powers in a decades-long battle of military and economic superiority. The space race was a symbolic part of the Cold War, and when the Soviet spacecraft Sputnik became the first to orbit the earth in 1957, the United States was shocked at being beaten. The event ushered in a new era of great U.S. government spending on technological, scientific, and military developments. The United States would later make its first successful rocket launch with Explorer in 1958, but perhaps more important to our world today was the creation that same year of a new U.S. Defense Department research agency that would eventually develop the Internet. In the decades that followed, new technology like microprocessors and fiber-optic cable increased the commercial viability of data transmission, paving the way for the Internet to become a mass medium.