Roger Summit, who invented the early online search service, has died at the age of 95

In 1966, to pass the time on a long family trip, Roger Summit pulled out a tape recorder and began dictating some thoughts about an idea he had at work.

Mr. Summit, a scientist at the Lockheed Missiles and Space Company, described a computer system that would allow users to remotely — and almost instantly — search large collections of scientific and technical literature.

Instead of visiting a library and going through ticket catalogs, researchers could type their queries into a computer and magically a list of the documents they needed would appear on their screens.

“I saw the potential of computerized information retrieval systems to ultimately change the nature of research,” Mr. Summit revoked in 2019. “After all, what good is knowledge if you can’t find it?”

During the drive he explained the options, talking into the answering machine for hours while his young daughter wailed in the back seat. When he pulled into their driveway, he had a name for his idea.

“The system was supposed to be interactive between man and machine,” he said years later. “In a sense, the searcher said, ‘This is what I want,’ and the machine actually said, ‘This is what I have.’ If it’s described like that, why not call it Dialogue?

Mr. Summit led a team at Lockheed that turned itself around Dialogue into the product. It became what many consider one of the first online search services, predating Google, Yahoo, and AltaVista by more than two decades.

Mr. Summit died on June 7 after being hit by a car near his home in Los Altos Hills, California. He was 95 years old. His death, which was not much talked about, was confirmed by his family.

While Mr. Summit never became a widely recognized figure in computing, his ideas envisioned the way billions of people would one day crawl the Internet and converse with artificial intelligence chatbots.

“Roger is one of the key founding figures in search,” said Marc Weber, an Internet historian, in an interview. “There’s no doubt about it. The dialogue was there right from the start.”

Driven by the belief that technology should benefit humanity, Mr. Summit began to think about the need for something like Dialog in the early 1960s, after his colleagues at Lockheed joked during meetings that it was easier to do research than to find what had already been done.

“The problem is akin to searching for Ali Baba,” Mr. Summit wrote in The Journal of Information Science in 1979. “You suspect he’s in one of the empty oil containers, but there are so many containers to explore that you give up.”

Using the Dialog system was very similar to using a search engine today, albeit in a cruder form. Computer stations were linked by telephone lines to databases that held millions of links 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. Researchers and librarians were amazed: Queries that normally took hours could be completed in mere minutes.

“This is my first short-term attempt to use you, you monster,” wrote a NASA scientist in his evaluation of Dialog. “The results are excellent.”

Another wrote: “I can’t stress enough what a huge help this system is, both in terms of work and time. Thank you.”

There was only one disagreement.

“The only complaint we received from the service was from a librarian who said the demand for her services had increased to the point that she had to cut her coffee break short,” Mr. Summit recalled in 2002. “We were thrilled beyond words.”

Roger Kent Summit was born on October 14, 1930 in Detroit.

When he was 11, his teacher parents sent him to a self-actualization retreat in Pasadena, California, where he saw mountains, deserts, and beaches for the first time. Impressed by the landscape, he returned to California in 1948 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 didn’t do it.

“We spent a lot of time talking about computers and I was fascinated,” he said in 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 computer business, Mr. Summit decided to pursue an MBA after his naval service ended in 1955. He again chose Stanford, where he took one of the first computer science seminars offered by the university.

After business school, he enrolled in Stanford’s doctoral program in management and eventually joined 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.

After the success of a test with NASA in 1967, Lockheed was awarded contracts to deploy Dialog by the US 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, intelligence organizations, and universities.

Lockheed sold Dialog to the Knight Ridder newspaper conglomerate in 1988 for $353 million. Since then, the service has changed hands several times and currently owns it Make yourself cleara 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 beginnings of online search. At the beginning of the speech he asked, “How many people have heard of the Dialogue?”

Less than half of the audience raised their hands.

Mr. Summit was not disappointed. He knew that Dialog was simply an early notch in the arc of digital history, and he marveled at Google’s capabilities.

“The speed of the search,” he said, “is just beyond my imagination.”