Dialog is an online information service owned by ProQuest, who acquired it from Thomson Reuters in mid-2008.[1][2]
Dialog was one of the predecessors of the World Wide Web as a provider of information, though not in form.[3][4] The earliest form of the Dialog system was completed in 1966 under the direction of Roger K. Summit.[5] According to its literature,[6] it was "the world's first online information retrieval system to be used globally with materially significant databases". In the 1980s, a low-priced dial-up version of a subset of Dialog was marketed to individual users as Knowledge Index.[7] This subset included INSPEC, MathSciNet, over 200 other bibliographic and reference databases, as well as third-party retrieval vendors who would go to physical libraries to copy materials for a fee and send it to the service subscriber.