Oral History Interview: Dr. Roger K. Summit (Part 1)

Interviewer: Roger, could you state your full name?

Roger Summit: It’s Roger Kent Summit. Roger is spelled without a “d”, and Summit is S-U-M-M-I-T with just a single “t”.

Interviewer: Tell us a memorable story that influenced your life later on.

Roger Summit: I guess it depends on which aspect of my life we’re looking at, but music has always been a very important part of my life. I remember my mother encouraging me to take up the trombone because she said there were not many trombone players and lots of sax players. She said if I took up trombone, I’d have a much better chance of playing.

This was in the eighth grade. I used to hitchhike downtown Detroit to take my trombone lessons, carrying the case—something you wouldn’t do these days. We had a music program in the eighth grade with a little band. My mother inquired if I could play in the high school band even though I was only in junior high, and I was admitted. That was the first great thrill.

My second great thrill was when I went to Cranbrook School out in Bloomfield Hills, a boarding school. The first Sunday afternoon, I remember walking around and hearing a live band playing “One O’Clock Jump,” a big Harry James tune at the time. I was quite thrilled and thought, “Gee, maybe someday I can play in that band.” It turned out I did play in that band a little bit later. That started a whole succession of trombone section work in 18-piece big bands.

I dropped it after I got married and got into the DIALOG business; there just wasn’t time. That was about 35 years ago. Then, just this past Christmas, I decided to pick up the horn again at the invitation of a friend who mentioned having three rehearsal bands in the area short on trombone players—just like my mother had predicted. It took me about four months to get the embouchure (what we now call “chops”) back to the point where I could sit in the section.

Early Exposure to Computing at Stanford

Roger Summit: I took my first computer programming class in 1957 at Stanford. We had an IBM 650 machine, which was one of the first digital computing machines IBM put out. We learned to program it in a class run by Bob Oakford. None of us, including Bob, knew anything about programming initially. We went through the manual step-by-step, wrote small programs, and suddenly got results.

Probably more important was discussing the future of computing and conceptualizing applications. We would do “air designs”—like playing air guitar—on prospective projects. One was a point-of-sale system: how neat it would be to have a computer deplete inventory automatically at the point of sale, compute margins, and set restocking levels so you wouldn’t run out. That class was the most influential factor in getting me into computers; I knew then that computer applications would become a major part of my career.

Family Background and Business Education

Roger Summit: My parents probably set more of a negative financial example than a positive one. They tended to look for shortcuts in life—my mother through spiritualism and guardian angels, and my father through other mystical pursuits. Growing up, I rebelled strongly against that in high school and set my own course.

My parents were both teachers and had no sense of finance; they suffered a disaster with their modest savings during the Great Depression, and my dad later got involved in ventures that never paid off. That taught me that I really had to learn about business and finance to feel comfortable. That drive ultimately led me to pursue an MBA.

At Stanford, Harvey Wagner, who taught operations research, was a very strong influence. Dan Teichroew introduced computers into the Graduate School of Business under the auspices of IBM and helped secure my scholarship there.

Earlier in high school, Leland Earl Bartholomew II was also a major influence. He and I would hitchhike downtown from Bloomfield Hills to Detroit to visit the Paradise Theater to hear Black big bands, especially Lionel Hampton. We often felt like the only two white guys in the entire theater, the place rocking. That heavily influenced my musical tastes.

Origins of DIALOG at Lockheed

Roger Summit: The project that led to the DIALOG enterprise was originally intended to be just one of several pursuits, but it turned into a career.

After my orals but before my dissertation, I went to work for Lockheed as a summer hire. I was assigned to the head of information processing, Eric Fischer, a very forward-looking individual who gave me assignments in information retrieval and computer simulation of cognitive processes. My dissertation focused on aerospace company operations simulation, but we also investigated information retrieval on second-generation computers.

Second-generation machines presented huge bottlenecks: there was no interactivity. It was strictly batch processing. You submitted your query, and if it wasn’t formulated exactly right, you either got bushel baskets of paper or zero results.

When the third-generation IBM System/360 series arrived, it became evident they had enormous potential for information retrieval. They introduced:

• Mass Random Access Storage: Allowing massive online databases where records could be picked randomly on demand.
• Interactive Time-Sharing: Allowing geographically dispersed users to query a central database simultaneously over telecommunications lines.

Our group at the Lockheed Research Lab submitted a proposal to establish an Information Sciences Laboratory. I was put in charge of the information retrieval project. On an IBM 360/30 with roughly 30K of magnetic core memory (RAM), we built a working demonstration on a large file.

That prototype evolved into the DIALOG system—which today generates roughly $400 million a year in sales, operates in 95 countries, and serves many thousands of customers as the first major commercial online retrieval service.

While LexisNexis focused primarily on legal, business, and general news, my vision for DIALOG was a broad-spectrum collection. Information problems rarely stay confined to rigid discipline boundaries; I wanted a unified service where a researcher could solve an information problem completely without having to search elsewhere.

Advice for Younger Generations

Roger Summit: I hope they find an endeavor they are truly passionate about. When you find that, self-motivation drives you toward contribution and personal fulfillment. Parents should stay alert to the interests their kids express and support them directly, rather than arbitrarily imposing a rigid array of activities. I also encourage young people not to stereotype themselves—pursue interests irrespective of expectations, knowing that persistence can accomplish nearly anything.

Memorable Milestones: ESRO & International Networking

Roger Summit: One exciting milestone was conducting transatlantic information retrieval between Europe and Palo Alto—likely the first time remote retrieval was operated internationally from Paris.

This was done in collaboration with the European Space Research Organization (ESRO, now ESA) and Noel Isotta, head of their documentation division. Noel had tremendous foresight regarding computer-based retrieval.

During the initial line test in a Paris office, we had German, French, and British engineers handling the physical connections who couldn’t understand each other’s languages. Noel translated the technical issues across all three languages on the fly while we twisted wires coming out of the wall together until the connection sparked to life and communicated with the mainframe in California.

Later, around 1968 or 1969, I traveled to Germany to install DIALOG on ESRO’s mainframe, seeing the lingering physical remnants of World War II across Europe.

Expansion into Japan

Roger Summit: We were the first online retrieval service to launch in Japan during the late 1960s and early 1970s. Japanese industry was already sophisticated in knowledge-gathering and information processing.

Two major companies approached us for representation:

• Kinokuniya: A major book distributor.
• Maruzen: A prominent commercial and retail department entity.

Rather than granting an exclusive distributorship—which risked losing pricing control or seeing the new service overpriced—I issued non-exclusive contracts to both. Both distributors continuously lobbied for exclusivity. When I asked each to submit higher sales targets in exchange for an exclusive license, neither could project numbers significantly higher than what they were already producing individually. Maintaining dual distributorships gave DIALOG double the booth presence and sales reach across Japanese industry conferences.

Life on the Road & Reflections

Roger Summit: My favorite area of all remains Palo Alto and Los Altos Hills. Returning home after extensive travel always confirmed that’s where I wanted to live.

One memorable incident involved trombone player and computer programmer Jeff Scharp. After touring on the road with Woody Herman’s orchestra, Jeff mentioned he was tired of constant travel. I recruited him to work for DIALOG, where he spent his full career.

Later in New York, Jeff heard Woody Herman was playing a private event. We went over to see the band, only to discover the venue was an all-male gathering supplied with heavy liquor and featured strip-tease acts accompanied by Herman’s world-class jazz orchestra. When we asked attendees what the group was, one burly man joked they were from the “SEC,” though it clearly appeared to be an underworld gathering.

Retirement and the Evolution of Computing

Roger Summit: I’ve never understood the conventional idea of “retirement.” To me, retirement simply means your time becomes discretionary rather than pre-committed. While I collect a pension and Social Security following Knight-Ridder’s acquisition of DIALOG, I maintain a retainer and regularly consult on projects.

My wife Ginger pointed out that the Internet arrived just in time for my retirement. The progression of computing continues to amaze me—from modern multimedia and MIDI music composition to web-scale textual search engines like Google.

When we started, our primary mass storage device was the IBM 2321 Data Cell Drive, which held 500 megabytes. We eventually chained 20 together to achieve an unheard-of 1 gigabyte of online storage across the entire network. Today, I can plug an external 60-gigabyte drive into my PC for $100. The exponentiation of compute power and storage has transformed what once took millions of dollars in enterprise hardware into everyday household capability.

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