The World’s First Computer Matchmaking Service



Waaay before eHarmony, there was "Match" - the original computer matchmaking service:

Out of computers, faster than the eye can blink, fly letters stacked with names of college guys and girls—taped, scanned, checked and matched. Into the mails speed the compatible pairs, into P.O. boxes at schools across the land. Eager boys grab their phones… anxious coeds wait in dorms … a thousand burrrrrrrings jar the air . . . snow-job conversations start, and yeses are exchanged: A nationwild dating spree is on. Thousands of boys and girls who’ve never met plan weekends together, for now that punch-card dating’s here, can flings be far behind? And oh, it’s so right, baby. The Great God Computer has sent the word. Fate. Destiny. Go-go-go. Call it dating, call it mating, it flashed out of the minds of Jeff Tarr (left) and Vaughn Morrill, Harvard undergraduates who plotted Operation Match, the dig-it dating system that ties up college couples with magnetic tape. The match mystique is here: In just nine months, some 100,000 collegians paid more than $300,000 to Match (and to its MIT foe, Contact) for the names of at least five compatible dates. Does it work? Nikos Tsinikas, a Yale senior, spent a New Haven weekend with his computer-Matched date, Nancy Schreiber, an English major at Smith. Result, as long date’s journey brightened into night: a bull’s-eye for cupid’s computer.

“How come you’re still single? Don’t you know any nice computers?”

Here’s an interesting article by Gene Shalit in the February 1966 issue of Look: Link

(And yes, today there is an unrelated dating site called Match.com)


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Posted on April 12, 2008 at 12:58 pm by Alex
Category: Blog & Internet, Science & Tech



5 comments to "The World’s First Computer Matchmaking Service"

  • Lostfiniel
    April 12th, 2008 at 1:44 pm

    Even before computers people would meet each other for dates without ever seeing each other. The lonely hearts column in news papers would advertise people looking for a mate, etc…

    The people who are so concerned about dating sites don’t have a full understand of the history of dating.

  • CheeseDuck
    April 12th, 2008 at 3:40 pm

    So did it actually work?

  • Alecks
    April 12th, 2008 at 5:57 pm

    Does anyone remember the part in Harold and Maude where Harold scares off all the girls from the dating service that his mom enters him in?

  • DCer
    April 12th, 2008 at 8:47 pm

    The Computer Dating Services were the punchlines of countless, literally countless, jokes on game shows and Laugh-In and Mad Magazine in the early 1970s. I remember watching something on TV about the Computer Dating Service where they talked about it starting in 1966.

    In junior high school, which for me was around 1979, we had a computer dating service fundraiser that had really dumb questions like, what kind of movies do you like or what kind of music do you like. And many people literally had no match (for instance, girls who liked heavy metal and slasher movies were in short supply at age 12). But people who liked “rock” and “comedies” were not, nor were they specific enough to matter.

  • Alannah
    April 13th, 2008 at 12:54 am

    I had thought that people were being ironic when they spoke like that, all 70’s. I had no idea that was really the way people spoke. I thought cocaine didn’t become popular until the 80’s.

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