Sunday, December 10, 2017

YOUR BUSINESS IS OUR PLEASURE. YOUR PLEASURE IS OUR BUSINESS.

No need for mistletoe.  
Fifty years ago--Punch bowls were out, punch cards were in.

While initiating my Year of the Clear and trying to sort through some love letters and less important correspondence from ages gone by, I ran across three letters to my husband written in 1968. All three of the letters were introductory letters from young ladies eager to have a chance to meet the then 22 year old handsome young Dutch man I have known for 40 years (and married me in 1980).

In one of the sort of "mail order bride" letters, the young mademoiselle mentioned their match on Operation Match. I just chuckled and looked forward to finding out more of this "match up." Guess what? He said that he had ZERO recollection of those letters or of Operation Match. So I cleared the deck and tossed the letters into the trash. 

As my curiosity can rarely be curbed, I decided to see if Google could enlighten me about Operation Match. According to my research, a couple of Harvard students in 1965 decided that blind dates and such meeting situations were not working for them is searching for a mate. One sharp guy came up with the idea of using computer data from a questionnaire to match up "couples." A questionnaire (150 questions) was filled in and a $3.00 fee for processing was collected from each participant. After a week or so, each participant would receive in the mail a list of five or six matches with contact info. 

It is obvious that either my hubby (or his mother or his sister) had filled in the questionnaire and had paid the fee. Thus, these three young ladies had been "matched" with him.  He insists that he does not remember a single thing about all this, but I find it to be very interesting. 

Operation Match was the very first computer social/dating/match. And all of this was even before the introduction of PC's (Personal Computers) in 1975!

I took some time yesterday to read through the 150 questions (75 for the participant and 75 for the participant to fill in about his/ her "ideal" mate.) Many questions would be seen as "sexist" (not sexy) or elitist today in 2017, but what should I have expected? These were written by Harvard male students in the late 1960's.🙄


What an Operation (match)😉

2 comments:

Joanne Noragon said...

Too, too funny. I remember working in a research lab where one young tech worked out a tic-tac-toe program. The program that became tic-tac-toe on all the original Microsofts. That was 1967.

NanaDiana said...

Amazing!!! Those guys were REALLY ahead of their time, weren't they? Your hubby probably doesn't remember anything about it....my hero can't remember half of his past (selective memory maybe?).

Hope you have a really great week ahead of you- xo Diana