Roger K. Summit

Roger K. Summit
Born	1930 Detroit, Michigan, U.S.
Nationality	American
Education	Stanford University

Roger K. Summit (born 1930 - Detroit, Michigan) is the founder of Dialog Information Services, and has been called the father of modern online search. He worked for Lockheed in the 1960s, was put in charge of its information retrieval lab, and from his work created a system that became known as Dialog and spun off by Lockheed in the 1970s. Dialog is one of the leading professional online services, used by companies, law firms, governments etc. as a key online research tool. Many feel that Dialog led the way to the Web’s search engines and search today.

Roger Kent Summit was born in 1930 in Detroit, Michigan. He grew up in Dearborn, Michigan, where both his parents were teachers. His father was also a guidance counselor and played piano and organ for silent films. Summit himself is musically gifted. He played trombone in high school and made money in college using his talent to play in dance bands. He also learned to play the horn. Summit vacationed in the West Coast in the summer of 1941 when he was 11 years old. It was the first time he had seen the mountains and the ocean, and the experience never left him. Later in life he decided to attend college at Stanford because of this early experience. He continues to reside there.

Summit holds a doctorate in management science, a master’s in business administration, and a bachelor’s in psychology, all from Stanford University. When he was a doctoral candidate at Stanford University in 1960, he took a summer job at Lockheed Missiles and Space Co. to improve information retrieval methods, and in 1962 was appointed designer and project manager at Lockheed. When the Lockheed Corporation formed the Information Sciences Laboratory (1964) their mission for the lab was to examine how third-generation hardware would affect computing in the information sciences. Third-generation hardware, typified by the IBM 360 computer, introduced mass random-access storage, remotely controlled processing via telecommunications, and a time-sharing operation that allowed many people to utilize the computer at the same time. Roger Summit and a colleague submitted a proposal to the Lockheed Corporation to further explore and develop this technology. He was then given responsibility for information retrieval. Organizations were already conducting searches by inputting queries on punched cards. However, searches couldn’t be revised after they were entered and during the process, therefore the outcomes of the search were at times unpredictable. The equipment that they were using was considered second generation equipment. Summit’s goal was to design an interactive retrieval language with third generation equipment that would by pass some of the problems they had with the second generation equipment

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