Youth: My IBM Baby

Their objectives are modest but crucial. “We just want to take some of the blindness out of blind dates,” explains the founder of Operation Match. After all, boy-meets-girl is a universal game, not to say necessity. But which boy and which girl? Operation Match, devised by two Harvard undergraduates, offers the impartial advice of a computer.

Computers have been used infrequently in the past to pair up dates for specific dances. But Match’s punch-card cupid has far larger horizons, deals in wide areas and adapts to any occasion. Founders Vaughn Morrill and Jeff Tarr launched their enterprise last February on a shoestring budget of $1,250 (Tarr won $500 of it on Password, the TV quiz program). They worked out a questionnaire that would both describe the writer and his “ideal mate,” then programmed an IBM 1401 computer to pair them off.

Short Circuits. Apparently many young people were groping for just such a helping hand. Within three months, 7,800 students from 100 New England colleges had paid the $3 fee, had their qualifications punched onto cards and scanned by Operation Match’s computer. Encouraged and figuring that what was good for New England was good for the world, the fledgling company set up shop in eight other college-heavy cities (San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago, Bloomington, Ann Arbor, Lansing, Detroit and New York). By the time all the full questionnaires are turned in for this fall’s roundup, Operation Match expects to have more than 100,000 names on its lists.

At first there were many short circuits. For one thing, people tended to lie about their looks, checked themselves off as attractive when “not exceptionally attractive” would have been a generous judgment. For another, the early computer program told a subscriber who his “ideal mate” was and whose “ideal mate” he was, but the names were seldom the same. One pioneer received a letter from a girl saying that as he was her dream come true on paper, she wanted to meet him in the flesh. When he finally stood face to face with her, he recalls: “I didn’t know whether to crowbar her into a cab, or put a saddle on her and ride her home.” This fall the computer was reprogrammed to pair off ideals.

Indoor & Outdoor Sports. But Operation Match also produced more than its share of fun dates. At Harvard, a varsity swimmer and amateur astronomer was desperately looking for someone who 1) would time his laps in the pool, 2) be willing to wake up at 3 a.m. to watch comets with him. The computer digested his questionnaire, squeezed out just the right ticket—a lithe, auburn-haired Radcliffe girl who was “fed up with Harvard pseudo intellectuals,” wanted someone who “enjoyed sports, both indoor and outdoor.” They are now going steady.

Op Match feels that it has just scratched the surface in machine-age romance. Next step is a process called “RealTime” that will allow a customer on any campus anywhere to fill in his questionnaire on a keyboard teletype (perhaps in the Student Union?) hooked up to a central computer. Within minutes, the keyboard will automatically type out the names and telephone numbers of five soul mates within driv ing range. Instant Eros, it seems, will be here long before 1984.