Google the term “inventor of search” and the world's most popular search engine will, unexpectedly, fail you. Nowhere among the algorithmically organized results will you find the names of the two men who, in the fall of 1963, sent the first known long-distance computer query—six years before Arpanet, the proto-internet, and lonnnnng before the launch of the world-changing Google, 20 years old this month.
Even Charles Bourne himself, the research engineer who built that first online search engine with Leonard Chaitin, a computer programmer, forgot about the wacky experiment for about three decades. “We just didn't know what it could become,” says Bourne, now 87 and a leading authority on the early history of automated information retrieval.
