If you remember punched cards, you are probably retired.

John Rudan does, and he is.

Rudan, who joined Cornell Information Technologies in 1960 and served in various directorial capacities from 1964 until his retirement in 1996, also remembers everything since. When he retired, he found himself in possession of some 60 boxes of documents and memorabilia. Going through them inspired him to do further research, interviewing other CIT and academic computing veterans. David Lambert, vice president for information technologies until 1997, encouraged him and provided resources, and Polley McClure, who followed Lambert, continued that support.

The result, after several years of work, is "The History of Computing at Cornell," published by Internet First University Press. As with all Internet First publications, the full text is available online in Cornell's DSpace repository at http://dspace.library.cornell.edu/handle/1813/62. Those who prefer a real, solid book to read on the bus can buy a copy through Internet First's print-on-demand service. As a bonus, the print version comes with a replica of a punched card as a bookmark.

While doing his research, Rudan collected almost 50 oral-history interviews and personal stories -- including one of his own -- which he has posted on a computing history Web site at http://www.cit.cornell.edu/computer/history/.

The book is organized by decades, from the 1950s through the 1990s, with a brief opening chapter on the years up to 1949. So, of course, the story begins in the age of punched cards -- cards about 3 inches high by 6 across with 80 rows of vertical punches, each coding for a letter or number (which is why early computer video terminals and later personal computers usually displayed 80 characters across). Each card carried a single instruction to the computer -- what we would now think of as a single line in a program -- and a program might consist of a box filled with hundreds of cards to be handed to a computer operator who would feed the cards into a machine the size of a classroom and bring back the results hours later, a process called "batch processing." Often the results would consist of something like "Syntax error in line 10."

Still, Rudan reports, the university found uses for these machines to manage financial and student records, and a few venturesome academics found instructional uses. Appropriately, Rudan calls the 60s "The Batch Decade." The 70s, then, are the "Time-Sharing Decade," when a student could sit in front of a black screen with green lettering and run programs on a distant (and still physically large) computer. The 80s, "The Decade of the Personal Computer," saw an explosion of computers on campus, the birth of Uncle Ezra and Bear Access and the creation of Cornell Information Technologies to consolidate a hodgepodge of earlier organizations.

The book ends with the 90s, "The Decade of the Network," bringing us fully into the age of the Internet. Rudan has said he might consider doing some sort of update eventually.

The story is filled with fine detail, from the makes and models of routers to the names of the people who accomplished almost every major and minor task described. Although very local to Cornell, the story could be seen as parallel to what was going on in business, government and personal computing through the same period.

Rudan reports, tongue-in-cheek, that one early reader called the 279-page book a "monumental opus." It is certainly a comprehensive and highly detailed account of one of the most important threads in Cornell's recent history.