The NY Times obituary today announced the passing of Roger Summit, the founder of Dialog, the first on line search entity. I remember Roger quite well. I was a Group President at Warner Communications in charge of their Electronic Home Services Division. My wife worked for Roger out of the New York Office so I saw first hand how it worked. She had a luggable TI terminal with a 1500 baud modem. She had been doing Dialog searches for a decade by the early 70s when she worked with me at MIT so I knew Dialog quite well.
In 1983 I met with Roger and tried to convince him to expand his service to the consumer market. I saw his data base engine and operational capabilities as an asset in my Warner system. I recall driving up to the end of Sand Hill Road, atop a major fault line and there was Roger's place. I guessed after a meeting that Roger did not see consumers ever being a market, and indeed in 1983 so did a lot of people. Yet at the time we had gotten retail stores, travel agencies, hotels, banks, and even on line gambling!
Roger was a visionary and he was fortunate at the time to have Lockheed financial support. Unlike today's venture companies, Roger was in the DoD world of start ups, great technology but no billionaires. He was also limited by the Bell System slow data rates. 1500 baud was a result of Bell System design. Thankfully the system was broken up, otherwise we would never have the information revolution we have today.
Roger should be remembered as the genius who started on line searching and making it a reality. Pity we were too early in the consumer space!
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