At the time of Bourne and Chaitin's breakthrough, most approaches for retrieving information were physical, for example, data stored on punch cards and sorted by machine.

The program they designed work the way Google does. A user could search for any word in the files. The data was sent over telephone lines, and after a long moment, the right answer was retrieved. Despite the success, the project was shut down. The world at that time had no use for the innovation.