2001

NORAD Tracks Santa

Come Christmas I had a small role to play in the NORAD Santa tracker project. NORAD, or North American Aerospace Defense Command had been around since the early 50’s as part of the cold war with Russia it was a set of radar stations providing an early warning system of a missile attack from Russia. On December 24, 1948, the United States Air Force issued a communique claiming that an "early warning radar net to the north" had detected "one unidentified sleigh, powered by eight reindeer, at 14,000 feet, heading 180 degrees.  According to legend, a Sears department store placed an advertisement in a newspaper which told children they could place a call to Santa Claus and included the number a phone number. Supposedly the phone number was misprinted and a call allegedly came through to Colorado Springs' Continental Air Defense Command (CONAD) Center. CONAD later became NORAD continued the Santa tracker by having volunteers in the service meaning phone lines to answer calls from children.  In 1977 NORAD Tracks Santa became a yearly website which in 2001 was hosted by AOL for which I was the project manager at AOL coordinating the AOL efforts. That Christmas Eve AOL set a new record for simultaneous video streams.  A couple of weeks later I received a nice certificate from some Colonel.   

Christmas