Operation Match

Before Tinder, before eHarmony, there was Operation Match, America’s first computer dating service. Founded in 1965 by lonely underclassman Jeffrey Tarr, the service upended campus courting rituals of yore, propelling the country towards its algorithmically embedded future. 

Operation Match: Jeff Tarr and the Invention of Computer Dating is the first-ever published account of Tarr’s story by his wife, Patsy Tarr. The following is an excerpt from the book.

Jeff Tarr and his friend and classmate Vaughan Morrill were juniors at Harvard when one of their conversations took an interesting turn. “It was a Saturday night and no one would have us but each other, and we were drinking,” Tarr says. “So we got the idea jointly that we’ll start a computer dating business to find dates.” 

At the time, schools in the Ivy League were men only, and they were just a couple of college guys who wanted to meet women. Socializing with students at the region’s women’s colleges usually happened in stale, sanctioned mixers or on random blind dates. Meeting people in bars wasn’t a thing back then—it wasn’t even really considered acceptable. The guys knew there had to be a better way. 

But where to begin? Tarr was good in math and statistics and had won an actuarial contest in high school, which earned him a summer job after his freshman year with the National Bureau of Casualty Underwriters in Manhattan—so he knew something about computers. If insurance companies could crunch millions of data points to predict the cost of fires, injuries, and car crashes, he figured, why not predict the electrochemical bond between two college kids? You could buy computer services from IBM, so all you needed was a way to collect data and enter it onto punch cards. 

Thanks to $450 he had won on the game show Password, Tarr had seed money for their venture, which he and Morrill named Compatibility Research, Inc. “We had a very professional sounding name,” Tarr says. Their service was dubbed Operation Match, and they developed an official-looking questionnaire for it to be run through a computer, resulting in a list of “ideal” matches for each respondent. Their aim was to meet women and make money. In that order. 

For the applicants, it was a simple process: they answered 75 questions covering a range of topics designed (unscientifically) to break down their personalities into matchable components, then sent in the completed questionnaires along with three dollars in cash. At the time, three dollars was roughly the cost of ten cans of beer or one thousandth of a year’s tuition at Harvard. The price seemed just right. 

“The first thing we did was to make sure they were in the same area,” Tarr says. “Mostly, girls wanted to go out with boys their age or older, their height or taller, the same religion, and so after we had these cuts then we matched them.” Tarr ran their answers, coded on punch cards, through a computer (first the IBM 1401 and later the 360). A few weeks later, the names, addresses, and phone numbers of at least five “ideal” matches arrived in the applicant’s mailbox. Operation Match was born. 

But it wasn’t conceived of for everyone. Operation Match was aimed at college students, young people like Tarr and his friends for whom school was not just about getting an education or forging a career path—it was also for meeting like-minded, educated, and cultured members of the opposite sex. In fact, this might have been the true genius of Operation Match as Tarr envisioned it: he found an ideal market for his product. It was a market that was just coming into its own both in real numbers and in the minds of Americans everywhere.

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Operation Match’s first questionnaire, crisp and official-looking, presented straightforward questions that nevertheless invoked the science of psychology and the mystique of digital calculation. Some questions were about age, social class, and religion. Others were about personal interests such as sports, bridge, economics, and folk music—topics very close to Tarr’s heart. And even though the focus was on general dating compatibility, some questions did try to tease out attitudes toward premarital sex. 

It was a start, but it wasn’t quite right. Tinkering and rethinking improved the questionnaire over time. Tarr realized that the initial version didn’t have enough questions to give a full sense of one’s personality, a problem he solved by instructing people to answer once for themselves and once for their “ideal date,” thereby doubling the data. 

“The questionnaire is addictive,” one female college student said. That enthusiasm was likely a product of the times, when computers’ breathtaking capabilities had people believing the machines were always right. Matches proposed by the computer were considered to have value, legitimacy. Feed those punch cards in randomly, and out pops truth and certainty. Incredibly, even couples who were already engaged to be married used the questionnaire to validate their choice of spouse. 

Vaughan Morrill transferred out of Harvard soon after the initial questionnaire was developed, so David Crump, Tarr’s roommate and fellow investor in Operation Match, became more involved. Crump had a car, which turned out to be essential for business, as the two of them drove to some of the more geographically isolated women’s colleges to deliver the questionnaires in person and drum up enthusiasm. 

“We were the Lewis and Clark of dating—traveling where few men dared to go,” Tarr says. He remembers whole dorms at Smith and Mount Holyoke colleges filling out questionnaires together when he and Crump arrived to attract business. Sometimes twenty girls crammed into a dorm room to debate the most winning answers. The question asking for a self-evaluation of your attractiveness could be answered from 7 (“ugly”) all the way down to 1 (“gorgeous”). 

Nobody ever put down a number higher than three. And one question gained particular notoriety: “Of the following I value most: money, power, prestige, security.” Tarr admitted that it might be “the meanest question on the test, but it’s kind of fun to answer.” It was true that answering the questions could be fun, but it could also be challenging in ways that weren’t immediately evident. 

In the Philadelphia Daily News, columnist Polly Devlin wrote:

Filling out the questionnaire unnerved me. The instructions were gentle and clear—but that didn’t prevent my utter confusion. One should answer the questions spontaneously. But if I did, I emerged as a cultured, honest, artful angel. If, on the other hand, I thought about them and answered them honestly, they showed me up to be a somewhat prejudiced, dogmatic, dishonest paradox. What to do? Cheat a little and be classified as a nice, attractive girl—and meet another cheat? Or tell the truth and die a thousand deaths because the computer won’t be able to find a comparable monster? 

“What troubles me about this computer jazz,” one sophomore woman told Look magazine, “is my feeling that boys don’t level when they fill in their questionnaires. I was honest with mine, but I wonder if some guys fill theirs out to see if they can get a first-nighter.” 

For Tarr, the questionnaire itself was a great conversation starter on dates. “We tried to include some pretty challenging questions,” he says, “for one thing, that gives kids something to talk about when they do get together.” Couples seemed to like this icebreaker aspect, too, he remembers. “They would say that if the computer matched [us] there must be some reason we were matched, and they would spend days finding out the reason—and then they got to know each other.” 💓