BOSTON GLOBE - Jan 13 - Finding a date by computer is commonplace today. Not so in 1965, when two student-run companies at Harvard rushed to usher in a new era of mating. Jeff Tarr decided he was fed up with coming home alone from mixers with Radcliffe, the women’s college across the way. Tarr raised $1,250 and recruited classmate Vaughan Morrill. He wrote a questionnaire that asked students to answer 75 questions about themselves and another 75 about their “ideal date.” He paid a friend $100 to program an IBM 1401 that would match questionnaires with similar responses. Tarr and Morrill distributed the questionnaire to Boston-area colleges. Students filled it out and returned it with a $3 subscription fee. Within days the student would receive a computer printout with the names, phone numbers, addresses, and graduating years of six people. By the fall of ’65, six months after the launch, ~90K Operation Match questionnaires had been received, amounting to $270K in gross profits. It didn’t take long before Operation Match met its first competitor. In the summer of 1965, David Dewan, an MIT grad, was preparing to enter Harvard Business School. Over the summer he drafted his own dating questionnaire and taught himself how to write code for the Honeywell 200, a car-sized contraption that, at around 3 in the morning, could be rented for $30 an hour from a small Boston mutual-fund company called Fidelity. He borrowed $10K from his grandfather to start his business. He called the service Eros and its parent company Contact Inc. He charged $4. In one distribution of questionnaires, he drew 11K responses at $4 each, or $44K in gross profits, more than $250,000 in today’s dollars. Things got ugly, fast. On September 29, 1965, campus police collared Dewan for the dubious crime of “distributing questionnaires without a permit.” The next day the Crimson splashed the news across its front page: “University Police Eject Man From Winthrop House.”
by Dan Slater
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