Contributed by: ElyseRomano on Thursday, July 28 2011 @ 07:49 am
Last modified on
At the World's Fair in Queens in 1964, a giant computer selected foreign pen pals for visitors to the Parker Pen Pavilion where it was housed. Curious sightseers filled out a questionnaire, inserted it into the machine, and shortly afterwards received a card with the name and address of a participant with whom he or she was determined to be a match.
Sound familiar? That machine, according to a recent article[*1] by Nick Paumgarten in The New Yorker, marked the humble beginnings of online dating. Inspired by the computer, Lewis Altfest, a 25 year old accountant, and Robert Ross, a programmer at I.B.M., teamed up to develop a similar method for finding matches a little closer to home. Altfest and Ross partnered with a group of Harvard students who had created Operation Match, a program that used a computer to pair people with potential dates, and soon a prototype called Project TACT was born.
Project TACT - which stood for Technical Automated Compatibility Testing - became New York City's very first computer-based dating service. TACT was initially restricted to users living on the Upper East Side, where the freedoms of the sexual revolution had been unreservedly embraced by many, and within a year over 5,000 subscribers had signed up for the service.
For a fee of $5, each user filled out a 100 question multiple-choice survey, the results of which were then fed to an I.B.M. computer for analysis. Questions covered a wide range of topics, from likes and dislikes to personal values, and also included gender-specific queries about a participant's ideal matches. When the program had evaluated the data, the computer produced 5 cards (blue if the participant was a woman, pink if the participant was a man) with the names of potential dates.
As TACT became increasingly popular and expanded to the rest of New York, Altfest and Ross found themselves in the pages of Cosmopolitan and the New York Herald Tribune. One woman, a reporter from a local radio station scheduled to conduct an interview with Altfest for a story about how New York couples meet, married Ross two years after Altfest was out of the office for the interview and Ross took his place.
Though Ross was pleased that TACT, in a way, did help him meet his wife, he eventually grew tired of the project, moved to London, and began working in finance instead. Despite the success of the project, Ross says that, looking back on TACT now, he considered computer dating to be nothing more than a gimmick and a short-lived fad.
Oh, how times have changed...