Most of you are reading this column on one of two mediums: either from your email inbox or a webpage you navigated to. What you may not realize is that we have the U.S. military to thank for both of them. Let me explain: In response to the launch 53 years ago this week of Sputnik, the Soviet Union’s satellite, the U.S. government launched a series of initiatives that led to the formation of NASA. Overlooked at the time was the concurrent creation of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or Darpa. Darpa worked with a few major research...
