Advent of Computing - Episode 193 - Digital Dating... SCAM?

Episode Date: October 25, 2026

Computers can do anything! They can open new fields of study, connect the world, and solve impossible problems. But can they find you love? The answer may be yes. That is, if you can escape all the scams, hoaxes, and odd happenings in the world of early comptuer dating! Like Advent of Computing? Then check out the after show! Adjunct of Computing is now LIVE: YouTube Spotify Apple Podcasts Join the conversation on the OFFICIAL discord server: https://discord.com/invite/GpFNu3DTU2

In 1946, the electronic digital computer was unveiled to the world. The new technology showed immense promise. The public was told that it would change the world just as much as the splitting of the atom. In fact, that's exactly how it was sold. Computers were a wartime technological leap that was now set loose for better or worse. That very year, computers would enable a new kind of mathematics. They would start to solve physics problems that were thought impossible. Slowly, machines made their way out of research and into business.

These new computers were found to be force multipliers. Work that was either too complex or too slow to be practical became an everyday reality. The 1950 U.S. census was crunched in just one year thanks to a brand new computer. These machines could do just about anything. But by the end of the 50s, most folk had never seen a computer save in photos. Machines were an abstract concept. Sure, computers are powerful, right? But what could they do for you?

Personally, could they solve any of your day-to-day problems? Well, maybe they could. According to some enterprising folk, there was a trick that a computer could do, they would help you. one that would help every single man and woman in America. A computer could help you fall in love. Welcome back to advent of computing. I'm your host, Sean Hass, and this is the conclusion of Spook Month, 26. Today, we have episode 193, digital dating scam?

It's estimated that these days, perhaps as many as 30% of marriages, start on dating website. That's the current high point of an ever-increasing trend. When did this trend start? When did folks start meeting their spouses with the help of computers? Would you believe this actually goes back to the 1960s? Things went slower back then. It wasn't all swiping and tapping. Singles filled out applications, data was loaded into mainframes, and matches were returned via mail.

I've said before, the computers were once a solution in search of problems. This was especially true back in the 60s. Machines were the future. We just had to figure out what that actually meant. And hey, maybe that meant that machines could find you the perfect date. This was the start of a new industry. Digital dating quickly went from an experiment to a business, and then problems started to crop up. By the end of the 60s, singles are calling these dating services hoaxes, scams, and hey, maybe they're not even using computers at all. In this episode, we're going to be looking at early origins of digital matchmaking and examining the scams that crop up around the new industry. Things are surprisingly rangy in the

official world here, so that means that the dark underbelly is especially strange. The plan was simple. A group of single male students at Harvard were having no luck meeting women. At the time, 1965, there were some female students at Harvard. Emphasis on some.

The same was true of most Ivy League schools. The Seven Sisters, a group of historic women's colleges, lay in the same region as the Ivy League schools. This led to some, well, let's call them interesting arrangements. radio diaries on PRX interviewed a number of students from this time period.

These two college systems set up mixers and blind dates. As one female student recounts, they would be loaded onto a bus, driven to the Harvard campus, and paraded around like, quote, cattle shows or a meat market, end quote. Not only was it a little gross and degrading, but apparently it just didn't work. James Tarr was one of these Harvard students that continued to be single after all of these events. A night of drinking with one of his colleagues, Va Morrow, led to an interesting idea. Tar had just come off an internship at an insurance company, where he had been exposed to, get this, a computer.

Better still, Harvard had their own machine. Maybe it could be coerced into finding some better dates for the two. This idea snowballed into Operation Match from a later pamphlet, quote, You may not know it, but you're one in a million. No one else is quite like you. You have different tastes and different attitudes from those of anyone else you know. But you're one in a million in another sense. If you live in an area with several thousand college students,

the number of possible matches for dating is several million. You yourself have a choice of several thousand dates and, be modest, that's too many to check out." They actually worked this up in a pretty smart way. A single looking to mingle would grab what Operation Match called a double answer form. You would answer a series of questions for yourself and for your ideal date. For instance, there is a section on religion. You could say that you were a Catholic seeking a Protestant.

Or in the interest section, you could say you were an avid swimmer looking to meet a musician. The selling point here, and the trick, is that the computer isn't using fancy code to match folk up. Singles describe themselves. As forms come in, Project Match builds up a database of personal information. The second part of those forms, the partner parameters, are basically queries. The computer just had to run those queries to find the close-seys. matches. Maybe our swimmer wouldn't get a musician, but they could meet an artist. Project Match would find you five close matches and send you their names and phone numbers.

From there, the computer's job was over, and to be clear, the computer's job was pretty minimal, was basically just keeping a database that was queried against. The scheme was relatively successful. At first, Project Match had to get some startup capital so they could rent out computer time on Harvard's IBM 7090 mainframe. But money rolled in pretty soon. Initially, a user had to send $3 in with their double answer form. That's about $30 today. At first, this was all restricted to colleges in New England, but Operation Match expanded.

It even added software to deal with location matching based off zip code. this was, from all accounts, a very legit outfit. Brochers claimed a quarter of a million matches made. The business ran for years evolving their code and questionnaire. Oddly enough, it never really worked for TAR. He'd end up falling in love after a blind date years after Operation Match closed, but the program was a real business. So what about the fake stuff?

What about the weird stuff? By 1966, other digital dating services were showing up, but not all of them were real. Not all of them were actually digital. Allow me to introduce the strange case of Project Flame. Its mastermind, Ted Sutton, told all to slate years after the debacle. The idea came while he was a student at Indiana University. Quote, I read an article about some students at Harvard. who were using computers and punch cards to try to match fellow students.

If they could do it, why couldn't I? End quote. There were some concrete reasons as to why Mr. Sutton couldn't do it, but that didn't stop him. He worked up a questionnaire and turned out hundreds of copies. Project Flame would take applications for a few weeks and then send out matches on March 8th, the so-called Flame Day. For just $1, a hopeful single, would receive three matches. Sutton received over 800 forms ahead of Flame Day,

but he didn't have any computer time. He didn't even know how to program. Instead, well, he just didn't. He simply implied he was using a computer. He said he was using some kind of formulation or algorithm to find your ideal dates. How was Sutton going to make Flame Day a success without a machine? Well, simple. He had an algorithm. It was called Random Chance.

There's no matchmaking here. He just shuffled forums and drew three cards for each single. That was it. It's a pretty neat way to spice up a boring semester and make a few hundred bucks, right? Sutton wasn't the only one to pull this a scam prank? I don't even really know what to call it. It's not exactly fraud, but it's not exactly honest either. Apparently another outfit based in Detroit did the same thing, advertising or at least heavily implying they used a computer, but just randomly matching up singles. These dating hoaxes were apparently common enough to breach containment

and enter the popular psyche. There are newspaper articles, op-eds, and angry letters about issues with the... services. That, to me, is a pretty good marker of popularity. If not ubiquitous, then enough people are upset about digital dating services, that it's making it into newsprint. One of these letters shows up in a 1968 issue of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. It's from a single woman who had paid for one of these services. It's not clear how much. What I can say is that operation match was very cheap for the market.

I've seen ads that range from $10 to hundreds of dollars. So this anonymous letter writer may have paid the modern equivalent of $1,000 or more dollars. What did she get? Well, every month a new letter would show up in the post saying, well, you're one in a million, and you have no dates. Quote, this machine mate-finding gimmick is a con. game and I hope it will soon be stopped by law." Some of these services just died on the vine.

In contemporary papers, there's the implication that total business death was expected. One company, the New Horizons Dating Club, may have operated like an exit scam. This is according to a 1980 issue of the Daily News. Yes, the phenomenon does drag on for decades. A woman paid into the service which guaranteed a first date within two weeks, and then she heard nothing. After taking her money, the business folded. Both the woman in the newspaper were unable to get a hold of the New Horizons Dating Club ever again. One issue may have been sheer numbers.

Mara Hicks describes this in her paper, computer love, replicating social order through early computer dating systems. Many of the dating companies had more women in their database than men. That implication is actually backed by hard data, specifically by the 1950 U.S. census. Reports issued by the U.S. government itself found that there were only 89 eligible bachelors for every 100 women. This number was actually arrived at because the U.S. government themselves were withholding some men for their own uses. namely military uses, but let's move on from that. There was a tendency for these dating services to treat this as a supply and demand issue. Like the old bus trips to Harvard, female clients were treated like a commodity.

Hicks argues that these companies were selling men on the chance to access these secret databases of women. In some cases, that sale was implicit. Sign up to our service, we'll give you some matches. Other times it was very explicit. The owner of one service, Dateline, was caught selling lists of women who would, quote, provide a night out never to be forgotten. Perhaps one of the more odd and disturbing twists to the business model was, and this is a doozy of a name,

Tactical Introductions Incorporated. That name would show up on flying. posters around Times Square. George Zycast was a book salesman, meaning he sold books to bookstores. He already had a distribution base in place. In 1968, just as computer dating was getting big, he hatched a scheme. Zycast submitted to a number of dating services posing as a single looking for love. For a fee, he got back matches. He huge. hit up different services until he had compiled a list of 25 single women, their phone numbers, and their home addresses. Then he ran off copies of that list. Sightcast went to his existing

clients, bookstores. He sold copies of this list to bookstores for 50 cents. Those bookstores then sold that list to customers for $2. Flyers around the city told local singles that they were just $2 dollars away from a guaranteed date. It's a tidy little trick, right? These dating services were essentially databases. Clients normally got just a few entries at a time, a few matches for possible dates. But if you could store up that data, you can make some money. Hit enough databases, and you can basically make a machine that gives you women's phone numbers.

Zycast ran into legal trouble, however. I'm sure you can imagine why. For one, this led to horrific harassment of these 25 women. This was a horrifying thing to do to single women in New York, but it was also illegal. Zycast had committed fraud. He'd be charged, fined, and told to stop. This takes us to what I find so odd about early computer dating. Machines of this era had a lot of power and promise. but in this application they're barely leveraged. Computers are more of a veneer.

It's about storage. These companies are just compiling databases than using a small amount of software to query against them. In fact, you can probably do this without a computer at all. I bet an old IBM tabulator could do the same thing. So, were there older dating services that didn't rely on computers?

Well, yes, actually. Matchmaking was an established business going very far back in human history. And some of those services would switch over to more modern operations. One such was the Eros Friendship Bureau founded in London in 1962 by one Joan Ball. Her services were a traditional matchmaking bureau. Using index cards and file cabinets, she helped single-lady. find husbands. Her service became automated in 1965. She made the jump straight to digital. She rented computer time on an IBM 1401 and then changed the company's name to Compat, since, you know, it's a computer company now. Note that the jump is all the way to computers.

There's no tabulators here. There were a number of other matchmaking services that made this jump. It seems that a lot of traditional matchmakers that made it into the 60s became fully digital. But there were some, some less well-known bureaus, that relied on tabulators. For this, I turned to a 1966 popular electronics article on these so-called automatic electric matchmakers. Allow me to introduce the Scientific Marriage Institute, a nonprofit founded in 1957 by Dr. George Crane. His approach differed from what we ran into so far. Crain was a psychologist. He had a theory that the success of a marriage could be scientifically predicted, calculated. So he said about doing just that. The Scientific Marriage Institute wasn't really a business in the normal sense. It was an

outfit made to prove a point. And its setup was strange. Singles wrote in to request help finding their statistically correct life partner. Once a fee was paid, an eye-watering $350. Cramed dispatched one of his cadre of clerics. Now, I don't mean this in the way I usually use the word. These aren't computer operators. These aren't desk jockeys. These are members of clergy. According to the article, Crane had an army of 3,000 clergy of all different faiths at his disposal, just waiting to meet singles. These literal love clerics then conducted intake interviews. Photos were taken, details written down, and a packet was sent back to the institute. Once in Crane's hands, the data was reduced down to punch cards.

Then, and this is the crucial part, there was no computer to read those cards. He used IBM Unit Record equipment. Crane had, at his disposal, an IBM Type 82 card-sorder and a Type 101 electronic statistical machine. The 82 is, whatever, it's just, you know, a card-sorder. boring. The 101 is much cooler. It was a combined machine, something like a super tabulator.

You could wire a 101 up to calculate, sort, and filter all at once. We don't have great information on what exactly Crane did with this tabulator, but I can hazard a guess. Earlier in the decade, he published tests for husbands and wives.

These were personality tests for marriage compatibility and success. Each test would spit out a numeric score. My bet is that the 101 at the Institute was using some kind of scoring system to compare singles. That would be well within the capabilities of that machine. That could also explain the expense of the operation. It would take a lot of time to run through the database. The Institute's singles database would have just been a pile of punch cards.

For every match, Crane would have loaded the singles deck and then sent through the client that was looking to match. It would take the machine quite a while to rip through the entire deck of single people. As folk got married, they'd have to be manually removed from the database too. Without a computer, that would mean physically finding their card and shredding it. According to Crane, this was well worth all the effort. By 1966, he believed his scientific approach was proven. his handy 101-type tabulator and an army of clerics had produced over 10,000 marriages, with only 10 leading to divorce.

The Institute was just one of a handful of these punch-card outfits on the scene. No computer needed, just old-fashioned tabulators. Apparently, the whole automatic dating craze was viewed with some embarrassment. The popular electronics article quotes one couple who, hid the fact they met via machine. And then it goes on to say this, quote, almost as clandestine are the American computer makers themselves. An IBM spokesman in Los Angeles, squeamish, at the use of IBM's thinking machines in courtship, parried all questions with a curt, go-ask Sperry Rand. Another computer maker's

representative put it just as bluntly. We don't encourage our computers being put to this use. Our feeling is that whenever the findings, they're far too statistical. Just a surface reading which misses the mark in psychological depth perception, end quote. Now, out of context, that's funny, right? It only gets better with context. Have you ever heard of IBM dances? These were one-time matchmaking events. The first one happened at the University of Iowa in 1963.

students bought tickets to a dance and were promised three blind dates. A computer took in vital statistics and chose your three dance partners for the evening. The first IBM dance was such a hit that universities across the country copied the event, some even shipping cards to U of I to use the original matching software. So now, imagine the look of horror on the face of that IBM spokesman when an editor from popular electronics starts asking about digital matchmaking three years after the IBM dance debacle. All right, with that we come to an end. Could computers really solve all your problems?

Could they find you true love? Well, as it turns out, maybe. That is, if you dodged all the scams and hoaxes. What I find interesting is that the more I poked at this topic, the more events kind of just fell out. There seems to have been a very long tradition of folk thinking, I can't get a date, but maybe this computer can give me a little help. Computers here served two distinct purposes. One was automation. A machine made matchmaking more scalable.

It made it so services could handle more clients and let them keep larger databases of singles. That led to functional, real businesses. It also, in theory, opened up more fancy matching algorithms. But as we've seen, that wasn't really taken advantage of in this early period. As with Operation Match, algorithms were simple. Ads didn't even really explain how matching happened, just that computers were used to find you the perfect partner. Which brings us to the second purpose of the machine.

Marketing. Computer dating sounded good. It sounded exciting. Maybe a little transgressive. That excitement could be put on sale. But you didn't actually need a computer to do bulk matching. It could be done by hand at random, or even with an IBM tabulator. And we're done.

That's the end of Spook Month, 2026. So, as I close out this month, I want to say, first of all, happy Halloween! Second of all, I can finally go back to my normal programming. I have an episode lined up for the start of November that I'm really excited to produce. I've been doing some background work for it, and I think it's going to be a hoot and maybe even a holler. Until then, you can go listen to the after show, adjunct of computing. We record every other Friday night on the official advent of computing Discord. If you want to help keep the lights on, you can support the show on Patreon.

Do that by going to advent of computing.com and clicking the big support the show link. And as always, have a great rest of your day.