50 years before Tinder’s swipe-based dating dynamics, Harvard students sparked the digital dating revolution with punch cards, algorithms, and a quest for campus romance. This was the beginning of the dating revolution.
In the winter of 1965, two Harvard undergraduates had an idea that would change courtship forever. Or so they thought. Jeff Tarr and Vaughn Morrill were long on ingenuity but short on ingenues—so they devised a computer process to match boys with girls of similar characteristics. They called it Operation Match.
This marked the inception of a significant dating revolution that would influence future generations.
Within nine months, some 100,000 college students had paid $3 each for the names of at least five compatible dates. The Great God Computer had arrived in the mating market, and American youth were eager converts.
The system was simple. Students filled out questionnaires covering 135 questions—everything from “Is extensive sexual activity part of growing up?” to “Do you believe in God?” They could add special instructions. A student from Yale requested, “Please do not fold, bend or spindle my date.” Another asked, “Where, O where is Superman?” While another pleaded for “buxom blondes who like poetry.”
The completed forms were fed into an IBM 7094, which computed difference scores for each potential pairing. The lower the score, the better the match. Within days, students received lists of compatible partners—strangers selected by magnetic tape who might, the algorithm promised, become something more.
The success of Operation Match was a clear indication of the dating revolution’s impact.
The response overwhelmed the founders. Applications flooded in from Boston to Berkeley. Tarr rented computer time for $100 an hour (“I couldn’t swing the million to buy it”), and the operation grew to a dozen schools. By summer 1966, Operation Match had grossed over $270,000. A rival service at MIT called Contact emerged, founded by David De Wan—who promptly lost his girlfriend to his own computer’s recommendation.
The media treated computer dating as either a technological marvel or a romantic apocalypse. “We’re not taking the love out of love,” Tarr insisted to critics. “We’re just trying to make it more efficient. We supply everything but the spark.”
But did the dating revolution work?
The evidence was mixed. A Look magazine feature followed Nikos Tsinikas, a Yale senior, on a weekend with his computer-matched date, Nancy Schreiber from Smith. They discovered they agreed on 70 of 77 questionnaire items. More remarkably, Nancy had recently vacationed in Salonica—Nikos’s hometown in Greece. She lived in Ypsilanti, Michigan, named for a Greek patriot. By Sunday, they were kissing for the cameras.
Yet not everyone found algorithmic romance so satisfying. A Northwestern junior reported that “the girl you sent me didn’t have much upstairs, but what a staircase!” A Vassar student who received names of other women demanded $20 for “defamation of character.” At a Yale dance where 200 students were matched by computer and tested before and after, researchers found an uncomfortable result: students who “picked up” their own dates reported more satisfaction than those paired by the machine.
Dr. Benson Snyder, MIT’s chief psychiatrist, offered a measured assessment. Computer dating reduced the anxiety of the blind date, he noted—”a boy knows that the girl has expressed her willingness to date by the act of joining.” But he warned against taking it too seriously: “If this becomes institutionalized, it could be seen as pressure for a safe, conformistic approach. In all relationships, there is a need for the unexpected.”
The deeper issue was what the computer could and couldn’t measure. The questionnaires captured attitudes, interests, and demographics. They couldn’t capture chemistry, timing, or the ineffable quality that makes one person magnetic to another. As Dr. Morris Davis, an astronomer at Yale’s Computer Center, observed: “Until body chemistry can be inputted into the computer to stimulate the actual reactions of two persons, I have my doubts concerning the efficacy of the method.”
The 1960s computer dating craze eventually faded, but its underlying premise never disappeared. Match.com launched in 1995. OkCupid followed in 2004, promising compatibility through extensive questionnaires. Tinder arrived in 2012, stripping the process down to photographs and swipes—arguably less sophisticated than Operation Match’s 135-question survey.
What Tarr and Morrill discovered in 1965 remains true today: technology can expand the pool of potential partners and filter for surface compatibility, but it cannot manufacture attraction. The computer supplies the introduction. The spark remains stubbornly human.
“If there’s some chick I’m dying to go out with,” Jeff Tarr reflected, “I can drop her a note in my capacity as president of Match saying, You have been selected by a highly personal process called Random Sampling to be interviewed extensively by myself…”
Even the inventors knew that sometimes the best algorithm is confidence and a good line.
For more on how technology has shaped the search for love, check out my book Costly Signals: The Evolution of Dating Advice.
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