Dialog - database center, info for students: what is the Dialog historically

From URL: http://www.dialog.com/about/

Dialog and the invention of online information services
Operational long before the commonplace use of the Internet, the earliest Dialog system was completed in 1966 under the direction of Roger K. Summit and was the world's first online information retrieval system to be used globally with materially significant databases.
Today, the Dialog online-based information services help organizations across the globe to seek competitive advantages in such fields as business, science, engineering, finance and law. The Dialog portfolio of products and services, including Dialog® and DataStar®, offers organizations the ability to precisely retrieve data from more than 1.4 billion unique records of key information, accessible via the Internet or through delivery to enterprise intranets.
With direct operations in 27 countries, Dialog products and services are a combination of highly accurate online research tools offering access to unique and relevant databases — designed to meet the specific needs of a wide range of users. Information professionals and end-users at business, professional, scientific, academic and government organizations in more than 100 countries prize Dialog services to meet their searching needs.
As part of the Deep Web, which is estimated to be 500 times larger than the content accessible via Web search engines, Dialog products offer unparalleled depth and breadth of content coupled with the ability to search with precision and speed. Our collection of over 900 databases handles more than 700,000 searches and delivers over 17 million document page views per month.
Searchable content on Dialog services includes articles and reports from thousands of real-time news feeds, newspapers, broadcast transcripts and trade publications, plus market research reports and analyst notes providing support for financial decision-making, as well as in-depth repositories of scientific and technical data, patents, trademarks and other intellectual property data. Additional content areas include government regulations, social sciences, food and agriculture, reference, energy and environment, chemicals, pharmaceuticals and medicine.
Today, as part of ProQuest, a leader in the collection, organization and publishing of information, Dialog combines industry expertise with technology to deliver critical information to leading decision makers in the financial, legal, scientific, and media markets.