John Rothman, who in an era before Google conceived and helped develop The New York Times Information Bank, a revolutionary system that let computer users easily find journalism by The Times and dozens of other publications, died on Thursday in Manhattan. He was 95.

His son, Andrew, said the cause was a stroke.

Introduced in 1972, the Information Bank was an electronic retrieval system that gave subscribers computer access, through telephone lines, to long abstracts of articles from The Times and other newspapers, including The Washington Post and The Los Angeles Times, as well as from magazines like Newsweek, Time and Business Week.

Mr. Rothman was a fitting leader for the Information Bank. He had, since 1946, worked for The New York Times Index , the invaluable monthly, quarterly and annual publications that offered summaries of articles from as far back as 1913, guiding students and researchers to find the full ones on microfilm.

“Indexing is a giant guessing game,” Mr. Rothman wrote in Saturday Review magazine in 1965, when he was the index’s editor. “Indexers must assess in advance what information a user is likely to seek, where he is likely to look for it and how much detail the abstract (or entry) should include to possibly spare him a trip to the original item in the newspapers.”