In the fall of 1964, on a visit to the World’s Fair, in Queens, Lewis Altfest,
a twenty-five-year-old accountant, came upon an open-air display called the Parker
Pen Pavilion, where a giant computer clicked and whirred at the job of selecting
foreign pen pals for curious pavilion visitors. You filled out a questionnaire,
fed it into the machine, and almost instantly received a card with the name and
address of a like-minded participant in some far-flung locale—your ideal match.
Altfest thought this was pretty nifty. He called up his friend Robert Ross, a programmer
at I.B.M., and they began considering ways to adapt this approach to find matches closer
to home. They’d heard about some students at Harvard who’d come up with a program called
Operation Match, which used a computer to find dates for people. A year later, Altfest
and Ross had a prototype, which they called Project TACT, an acronym for Technical
Automated Compatibility Testing—New York City’s first computer-dating service.
<a href="http://www.christiansingles.com">Online dating</a>
Each client paid five dollars and answered more than a hundred multiple-choice questions.
One section asked subjects to choose from a list of “dislikes”: “1. Affected people.
2. Birth control. 3. Foreigners. 4. Free love. 5. Homosexuals. 6. Interracial marriage,”
and so on. Another question, in a section called “Philosophy of Life Values,” read,
“Had I the ability I would most like to do the work of (choose two): (1) Schweitzer.
(2) Einstein. (3) Picasso.” Some of the questions were gender-specific.
Men were asked to rank drawings of women’s hair styles: a back-combed updo,
a Patty Duke bob. Women were asked to look at a trio of sketches of men in various
settings, and to say where they’d prefer to find their ideal man: in camp chopping wood,
in a studio painting a canvas, or in a garage working a pillar drill. TACT transferred
the answers onto a computer punch card and fed the card into an I.B.M. 1400 Series
computer, which then spit out your matches: five blue cards, if you were a woman, or
five pink ones, if you were a man.
a twenty-five-year-old accountant, came upon an open-air display called the Parker
Pen Pavilion, where a giant computer clicked and whirred at the job of selecting
foreign pen pals for curious pavilion visitors. You filled out a questionnaire,
fed it into the machine, and almost instantly received a card with the name and
address of a like-minded participant in some far-flung locale—your ideal match.
Altfest thought this was pretty nifty. He called up his friend Robert Ross, a programmer
at I.B.M., and they began considering ways to adapt this approach to find matches closer
to home. They’d heard about some students at Harvard who’d come up with a program called
Operation Match, which used a computer to find dates for people. A year later, Altfest
and Ross had a prototype, which they called Project TACT, an acronym for Technical
Automated Compatibility Testing—New York City’s first computer-dating service.
<a href="http://www.christiansingles.com">Online dating</a>
Each client paid five dollars and answered more than a hundred multiple-choice questions.
One section asked subjects to choose from a list of “dislikes”: “1. Affected people.
2. Birth control. 3. Foreigners. 4. Free love. 5. Homosexuals. 6. Interracial marriage,”
and so on. Another question, in a section called “Philosophy of Life Values,” read,
“Had I the ability I would most like to do the work of (choose two): (1) Schweitzer.
(2) Einstein. (3) Picasso.” Some of the questions were gender-specific.
Men were asked to rank drawings of women’s hair styles: a back-combed updo,
a Patty Duke bob. Women were asked to look at a trio of sketches of men in various
settings, and to say where they’d prefer to find their ideal man: in camp chopping wood,
in a studio painting a canvas, or in a garage working a pillar drill. TACT transferred
the answers onto a computer punch card and fed the card into an I.B.M. 1400 Series
computer, which then spit out your matches: five blue cards, if you were a woman, or
five pink ones, if you were a man.
