The Strange, Sad, & Hilarious History Of Online Dating

This article is adapted from How Sex Changed the Internet and the Internet Changed Sex: An Unexpected History, out Nov. 15 from Workman Publishing. Order it here now.

In 1727, the Manchester Weekly Journal ran a personal advertisement written by Helen Morrison that declared her intentions to seek a husband. Men had been placing newspaper personals for more than thirty years by then, advertising their assets and readiness to take a wife. But this was the first time a woman had the audacity to run one for herself.

Morrison’s ad shocked the Journal’s readership so much that they decided she must be made an example of, lest her gall become contagious among single women. After a public outcry, the mayor committed her to an asylum for four weeks.

Nearly two and a half centuries later, in sixties London, Joan Ball founded St. James Computer Dating Service — the first computer-assisted dating company. As a young woman, she was wrongfully committed to a mental hospital for standing up to her mother’s abuse. Despite tooth-and-nail success, Ball is largely excluded from online dating history. The punishment for women who stray from the social norms was, and often still is, to put them away and try to make the world forget.

In 1965, a year after Ball, Harvard undergrad math major Jeffrey Tarr founded the world’s second computer dating company. Tarr’s primary motivation was to meet more women outside the limited campus pool. His company, Operation Match, ended up raking in $270,000 in profits in its first year — equivalent to more than $2.2 million today.

The first online dating network arrived decades later in 1984, with the Matchmaker Electronic Pen-Pal Network. Started on bulletin board systems, Matchmaker grew to fourteen boards across as many major cities around the U.S. On its heels, sites like Match.com and OkCupid promised not just proximal and hobby-based love, but also something closer to Operation Match: a computer that knows you and has a mate waiting.

Before he became the oddball mustachioed Today Show film and book critic, Gene Shalit was a reporter. And in the history of computerized dating, Shalit’s visit to Harvard to interview student-entrepreneurs like Tarr working on the hot new dating-craze technology of 1966 put the fledgling industry on the map. His breathless write-up for Look magazine sent the reader spinning:

A nationwide 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.

The Operation Match system, however, was low-tech for a God Computer. Students would fill out a two-part, seventy-five-question pamphlet, one for your own answers about your lifestyle and beliefs and the other describing your ideal mate. Answers to questions like “Do you believe in a god that answers prayer?” and detailed scenarios about their approaches to blind dates or crossword puzzles would supposedly be compared with the answers of thousands of other respondents. Fold up the pamphlet, mail it back, and the Operation Match guys would convert it to punch cards on an IBM 7090 computer between the hours of 2 a.m. and 4 a.m. — the time when it was cheapest to rent the machine. They’d sort the cards by a few important criteria like location, religion, age, and height, and the rest were basically matched at random, Tarr said in a documentary.

The literal and metaphorical machinations of matches were almost beside the point. It was the mysticism of the computer that provided the real sparks. “It had a legitimacy that maybe your buddy Tom or your girlfriend Sarah would not have in saying ‘this is the perfect girl or the perfect guy for you,’” Operation Match VP and fellow Harvard alum David Crump said. The narrowed selection, the excuse to call up a consenting stranger, and the hours of conversation that followed, trying to figure out what the computer must have seen in you to match you — those were the real secret ingredients.

“The Great God Computer must know something we don’t,” Tarr told author Dan Slater for his book on the history of online dating, A Million First Dates. “The idea that we were matching based on compatibility was purely a marketing thing. It was always more art than science.”

In spite of all the excitement about computer-facilitated love, Operation Match entered the world just a few decades too early to really catch on. Online dating wouldn’t take off until people could date from the privacy of their own homes and control their own selections and questionnaires (or at least, have the illusion of control and wide selection).

And Tarr may have been in it to get girls, but — like another famous Harvard student who’d start “FaceMash” in his dorm nearly forty years later — he was still something of a visionary. While Operation Match gained popularity, he told Shalit he dreamed of expanding the service to installations of “hundreds of special typewriters,” strewn around campus for students to type in their requirements for a date that night, “all linked to a centralized ‘mother computer’” that would return compatible names of others who were free for a date that night. Sounds a lot like the dating apps of right now.

By the time Ball heard about Operation Match, she’d been running her own computer dating company, the St. James Computer Dating Service, in London for four years, since 1964. In 1965, St. James merged with another marriage bureau and became Com-Pat, or Computer Dating Services Ltd.

The London Times ran a short “Report on Computer Romance” in 1966, about the “first couple” to marry as a result of computer dating. Susie and Leon filled out Com-Pat questionnaires after seeing advertisements in the paper; in a twist, the pair didn’t speak the same language.

“What the calculating brain did not take into account as it sifted through thousands of permutations for likely matches, was that Leon has limited English and Susie speaks hardly a word of Italian,” one article said. “‘It doesn’t seem to matter,’ said Susie (blonde, placid, optimistic, according to the computer). ‘We are extremely happy and I am helping Leon with his English.’ Leon replied, ‘I met, I liked, I married.’”

In December 1968, Ball sat with a gaggle of her employees in the Com-Pat offices and flipped through the latest issue of News of the World, looking for an article in which she’d been quoted. Like everything else in her life, Ball getting interviewed for the piece was against the odds. For years she struggled to place advertisements anywhere, meeting endless rejections from publications too nervous to promote anything remotely sexual. Her office landlord took the name of her business off the front door directory so often she stopped putting it back up.

Ball’s company was barely staying afloat when she saw an advertisement for Dateline, another U.K.-based computer dating service, plastered across the London tube: “Could you be sitting next to the new man in your life?” The founder of Dateline, John Patterson, started the company in 1966, after watching the success of Operation Match in the States.

Exasperated and enraged, Ball called several newspapers, desperate for any kind of publicity. Her next appointment with the matching mainframe was coming up — and she was short on clients to feed it.

Finally, the tabloid News of the World bit. The resulting article also profiled Operation Match and Dateline, and flooded Ball with new business: By Christmas, two thousand people sent applications to Com-Pat, hoping the computer could find their match. That write-up brought more press attention, and more clients. When satisfied customers called the office to thank Ball, she’d beg them to tell their stories to the press, but they often said they were too worried about their reputation or their jobs to go public with how they had met their new lovers. Even as thousands of people around the U.K. found happiness through computerized matchmaking, introducing your partner as having come out of a computer program was still taboo.

Even with small wins like these, Com-Pat couldn’t stay afloat in a market that wouldn’t fully accept it. After years of trying to drum up advertising through word of mouth from happy clients, the company floundered. Ball eventually sold Com-Pat to Dateline’s John Patterson, for £5,000. The only condition was that he pay the £7,000 of debt the company carried. The sale crushed her.

With the advantage of being a slick businessman and having the U.K. computer dating market now primed by Ball’s Com-Pat, Patterson developed Dateline into a more sexually forward service that was “adventure” focused. Later, he started a separate, even more explicit service, according to technology historian Mar Hicks. “That service asked users how sexually experienced they required their partners to be, along with which specific sex acts customers had engaged in previously, and which ones they wished to perform in the future,” Hicks wrote. According to Hicks, Patterson ran into trouble after selling lists of women who were “ready to go” to men without the women’s knowledge or consent.

Dateline was ultimately prolific but not particularly successful for its clients, if the definition of online dating success is a happily-ever-after. Patterson estimated that the company matched more than forty thousand prospective couples a year, but only around two thousand of them ended up married.

Despite their groundbreaking and innovative work in computer dating, neither Patterson nor Ball found their happily-ever-afters. Patterson was found dead in a bath by his ex-wife at 51, following years of struggling with alcoholism and failed relationships.

Ball never married. She and her partner in work and life, Kenneth, drifted apart amid their drive to constantly put the business and their clients first. When Ball later read letters from Kenneth about their breakup, she realized too late that they’d simply miscommunicated their feelings all along.