In 1955 – As NORAD tells the story, a misprinted phone number caused Continental Air Defense Command, CONAD to start getting calls from children for Santa Claus, so Director of Operations Colonel Harry Shoup, had his staff check the radar for signs of St. Nick. NORAD was created in 1958 and they’ve kept up the tracking tradition ever since.

In 1955 – The Associated Press syndicated a story that Santa Claus was being guaranteed safe passage into the United States. The story reported that, “CONAD, Army, Navy and Marine Air Forces will continue to track and guard Santa and his sleigh on his trip to and from the US.”

In 1968 – The crew of Apollo 8 delivered a live, televised Christmas Eve broadcast after becoming the first humans to orbit another space body.

In 1999 – The very seasonal HTML 4.01 was published by the World Wide Web Consortium. HTML 4.01 remained the HTML standard for well over a decade.

In 2014 – Sony released its film “The Interview” online through Google and Microsoft as well as in limited theaters. The film’s release had been canceled after threats were issued and major theater chains declined to show it.

Like Tech History? Get the illustrated Year in Tech History at Merritt’s Books site.

In 1947 – John Bardeen and Walter Brattain demonstrated their new discovery, the transistor, at Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill, New Jersey. William Shockley, who contributed to the invention, missed the presentation.

In 1968 – Apollo 8 astronauts Frank Borman, James A. Lovell, Jr., and William A. Anders made the lunar-orbit-insertion maneuver on their way to becoming the first humans to orbit the Moon.

In 1986 – Dick Rutan and Jeana Yeager touched down at Edwards Air Force Base in the experimental airplane Voyager, completing the first non-stop, round- the- world flight without refueling.

Like Tech History? Get the illustrated Year in Tech History at Merritt’s Books site.

In 1666 – Seven mathematicians and seven physicists gathered by Jean-Baptiste Colbert met in the king’s library to found the French Academy of Sciences.

In 1882 – Edward H. Johnson of the Edison Illumination Company strung a single power cord with red white and blue lights on his Christmas tree becoming the first person to use Christmas tree lights.

In 1885 – A patent for a gravity switchback railway was issued to La Marcus Thompson of Coney Island, New York. You and I might call it a “roller coaster.”

In 1968 – At 3:01 PM Eastern time, Apollo 8 transmitted the first US. live telecast from a manned spacecraft in outer space.

Like Tech History? Get the illustrated Year in Tech History at Merritt’s Books site.

In 1898 – Building on Henri Becquerel’s discovery of spontaneous radioactivity two years earlier the husband-and-wife team of Pierre and Marie Curie discovered Radium. Marie particularly figured out how to separate it from its radioactive residues.

In 1937 – Walt Disney’s first full-length animated film, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs opened in Los Angeles. It ran 83 minutes. It was also the first animated film produced in color.

In 1968 – Apollo 8, the first manned mission to the moon, launched from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The crew performed the first ever manned Trans Lunar Injection and became the first humans to leave Earth’s gravity. The Apollo Guidance Computer was the first computer to use integrated circuit logic.

Like Tech History? Get the illustrated Year in Tech History at Merritt’s Books site.

In 1880 – New York’s Broadway from 14th to 26th street was first lighted by electricity and became known as the “Great White Way.”

In 1951 – In Idaho, the Experimental Breed Reactor no. 1 aka EBR-1 became the first power plant to produce electricity using atomic energy. It would take two more years to prove it could create more fuel than it consumed.

In 1996 – Apple announced it would acquire NeXT Computer and bring co-founder Steve Jobs back to the company he left in 1985.

Like Tech History? Get the illustrated Year in Tech History at Merritt’s Books site.

In 1958 – The first known radio broadcast from outer space was transmitted. US President Eisenhower spoke from a pre-recorded message aboard the Project SCORE experimental satellite. Redundancy paid off as the first recorder failed but the backup worked.

In 1972 – Apollo 17, the last manned lunar flight crewed by Eugene Cernan, Ron Evans and Harrison Schmitt, returned to Earth.

In 1999 – TIME Magazine announced Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon, as its person of the year. The magazine cited online shopping and dot-com mania among the reasons.

Like Tech History? Get the illustrated Year in Tech History at Merritt’s Books site.

In 1839 – John William Draper took a daguerreotype of the moon, the first lunar photograph.

In 1878 – Joseph Swan demonstrated the electric lamp to the Newcastle Chemical Society in northern England. His bulb would burn for about 40 hours. Edison’s later bulb would burn for closer to 150 hours.

In 1987 – Larry Wall released the Perl scripting language. It would go from being a SysAdmin’s helper to one of the Web’s dominant scripting languages, for good or ill, depending on the coder.

In 1997 – HTML 4.0 was recommended and published by the World Wide Web Consortium, the W3C. It offered the strict, transitional and frameset variations, and deprecated many of Netscape’s visual tags in favor of CSS.

Like Tech History? Get the illustrated Year in Tech History at Merritt’s Books site.

In 1880 – The Edison Electric Illuminating Company of New York was incorporated to install a central generating station in New York City. New Yorkers know it now as ConEd.

In 1903 – Orville Wright successfully made a flight in a heavier-than-air machine that took off from level ground under its own power and was controlled during flight. It’s generally considered the first airplane flight.

In 1997 – John Barger coined the term ‘weblog’ to describe his list of links on his site, Robot Wisdom. Peter Merholz would later shorten it to just ‘blog’.

In 2012 – The W3C announced it had completed the definition of HTML 5.

Like Tech History? Get the illustrated Year in Tech History at Merritt’s Books site.

In 1935 – A Time magazine article described the use of the pattern of capillaries in the retina as a means of identification called eye prints. Hello biometrics!

In 1947 – John Bardeen and Walter Brattain applied two closely-spaced gold contacts held in place by a plastic wedge to the surface of a small slab of high-purity germanium. It was the next step in the development of the Transistor.

In 2002 – Creative Commons formally launched, unveiling Machine-Readable Copyright Licenses and a revamped website.

Like Tech History? Get the illustrated Year in Tech History at Merritt’s Books site.

In 1953 – Dudley Buck entered the idea for the Cryotron into his MIT notebook. The cryotron is a four-terminal superconductive computer component.

In 1965 – Gemini 6A, crewed by Wally Schirra and Thomas Stafford launched from Cape Kennedy, Florida. Four orbits later, it achieved the first space rendezvous, with Gemini 7.

In 1994 – Netscape shipped version 1.0 of the Netscape Navigator Web browser.

Like Tech History? Get the illustrated Year in Tech History at Merritt’s Books site.