In 1966, to pass the time on a long family road trip, Roger Summit pulled out a tape recorder and began dictating some thoughts about an idea he had been kicking around at work.
Mr. Summit, a research scientist for Lockheed Missiles and Space Company, described a computer system that would allow users to remotely — and almost instantaneously — search large collections of scientific and technical literature.
Instead of visiting a library and rifling through card catalogs, researchers would be able to type their queries into a computer and, like magic, a list of the documents they needed would appear on their screens.
“I saw the potential for computer-based information-retrieval systems ultimately changing the nature of research,” Mr. Summit recalled in 2019. “After all, what good is knowledge if you cannot find it?”
As he drove, he expounded on the possibilities, talking into the recorder for hours while his infant daughter wailed in the back seat. By the time he pulled into their driveway, he had a name for his idea.
“The system was to be interactive between man and machine,” he said years later. “The searcher in a sense said, ‘This is what I want,’ and the machine said, in effect, ‘This is what I have.’ Described that way, why not call it Dialog?”
Mr. Summit led a team at Lockheed that turned Dialog into a product. It became what many consider to be one of the first online search services, preceding Google, Yahoo and AltaVista by more than two decades.
Mr. Summit died on June 7 after being struck by a car near his home in Los Altos Hills, Calif. He was 95. His death, which was not widely reported, was confirmed by his family.
While Mr. Summit never became a widely recognized figure in computing, his ideas anticipated the way billions of people would one day trawl the internet and converse with artificial intelligence chatbots.
“Roger is one of the key founding figures in search,” Marc Weber, an internet historian, said in an interview. “There’s no doubt about that. Dialog was there right at the beginning.”
Driven by the belief that technology should benefit humanity, Mr. Summit began pondering the need for something like Dialog in the early 1960s, after his Lockheed colleagues would joke during meetings that it was easier to redo research than to find what had already been done.
“The problem is similar to the search for Ali Baba,” Mr. Summit wrote in The Journal of Information Science in 1979. “You suspect he is in one of the empty oil jars, but there are so many jars to examine you give up looking.”
Using the Dialog system was a lot like using a search engine today, although in a cruder form. Computer stations were connected through telephone lines to databases that stored millions of references to articles and reports.
In 1967, Lockheed conducted a proof-of-concept test with NASA, linking Dialog to a database of more than 250,000 documents at the space agency. Scientists and librarians were astonished: Queries that normally took hours could be completed in mere minutes.
“This is my first, short-period attempt to use you, you monster,” a NASA scientist wrote in his evaluation of Dialog. “The results are excellent.”
Another wrote: “I am unable to stress sufficiently the tremendous help this system is, both in terms of labor and time. Thank you.”
There was just one dissent.
“The only complaint we got from the service was from a librarian who said demand for her services had increased to the point that she had to cut short her coffee break,” Mr. Summit recalled in 2002. “We were excited beyond words.”
Roger Kent Summit was born on Oct. 14, 1930, in Detroit.
When he was 11, his parents, who were teachers, sent him to a self-realization retreat in Pasadena, Calif., where he saw mountains, deserts and beaches for the first time. The scenery impressed him, and in 1948, he returned to California to attend Stanford, where he majored in psychology.
One afternoon during his senior year, his girlfriend asked him, “Do you know there’s a new thing called a computer?”
He did not.
“We spent a lot of time talking about computers, and I was fascinated,” he said in a 2003 interview with Information Today. “My career path was guided by that relationship.”
After graduating in 1952, he served as a communications officer in the Navy, on the aircraft carrier Valley Forge. He discussed computers with another officer, who suggested that Mr. Summit buy stock in Texas Instruments.
Knowing nothing about stocks or the emerging business of computing, Mr. Summit decided to pursue an M.B.A. when his naval service ended in 1955. He again chose Stanford, where he took one of the first seminars on computer science offered by the university.
After business school, he enrolled in Stanford’s doctoral program in management science, eventually joining Lockheed as a summer intern assigned to the information-processing group.
“And that’s what started this whole information excursion,” Mr. Summit said in 2003.
Following the success of the 1967 test with NASA, Lockheed won contracts to deploy Dialog at the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, the European Space Research Organization and other government agencies.
In 1972, Lockheed introduced Dialog to the commercial sector, selling remote access to scientific and information databases to libraries, law firms, news organizations and universities.
Lockheed sold Dialog to the newspaper conglomerate Knight Ridder for $353 million in 1988. The service has changed hands several times since then and is currently owned by Clarivate, a British information-services company.
Mr. Summit married Virginia Buckhorn in 1964. She survives him, along with their children, Scott and Jennifer Summit.
In 2005, Google invited Mr. Summit to speak about the early days of online search. Opening his talk, he asked, “How many people have heard of Dialog?”
Fewer than half of the audience members raised their hands.
Mr. Summit wasn’t disheartened. He knew that Dialog was simply an early notch on the arc of digital history, and he marveled at Google’s capabilities.
“The retrieval speed,” he said, “is just beyond my imagination.”
