Damn, now you've made me want to dig up the story of Germany's first online rail journey planner as written by its creator: it was in the 90's, before Deutsche Bahn had an online presence, but they had the journey information on CD-ROM. The guy took the data from the CD-ROM and created a tool that would return journeys between 2 stations if you queried it. And how does the query work? You'd e-mail his uni address, his "server" (in reality a PC in the corner of his room) would fetch emails every 5 minutes, process the queries and e-mailed back the results.

Sadly Google and DDG are useless now, the last time I wanted to find this story it took a lotttt of time.