Stop us if you've heard this story already: Two tech-savvy Harvard students have the same revolutionary idea at around the same time. See, they want to use computers to help their classmates get laid. The idea is so big, so fresh, that both sides are sure there's a fortune to be made. The question is who will nail down the market first.
If you guessed The Social Network, the front-runner for best picture at this year's Oscars, you're...wrong. Well, not wrong, exactly, but this isn't that story. Almost 40 years before Mark Zuckerberg allegedly hoodwinked the Winklevoss twins and pushed out partner Eduardo Saverin to create Facebook, two rival sets of "mir weary" Harvard students scrambled to corner the market for computer-dating. Things got ugly, fast. On September 30, 1965, the Harvard Crimson reported: "University Police Eject Man from Winthrop House."
"I don't know why all this social networking stuff starts at Harvard," says Chris Walker, now 66, then a player at the center of Harvard's first geek-on-geek war. "Maybe it's because once you get in, you can't flunk out. Unless you rape a nun on the street or something."
Let's rewind: Though computer-dating was still a new concept in 1965—back then, the answers to personality questionnaires were converted into punch cards which were then fed into computers the size of small cars—two rival outfits had already popped up at Harvard: Operation Match and Contact Incorporated. Very little distinguished the two companies. Operation Match sold its questionnaires for $3. Contact charged $4. The Operation Match questionnaire was somewhat playful. Contact posed more serious questions. (One Operation Match survey question, "My race is...," had only three options: Caucasian, Oriental, or Negro.) Still, both aimed to expand the campus dating pool from Wheaton to Wellesley, from Pembroke to Mount Holyoke.
And like the story of The Social Network, the intrigue here had as much to do with the thrill of new technology as it did with who talked the most smack. Contact's David Dewan—then a Harvard MBA candidate—was spoiling for a fight. He told the Crimson that Operation Match's questionnaire was "less sophisticated, appealing to the big, Mid-west universities." In response, it appears, the founders of Operation Match alerted the campus police that Dewan was about to paper Harvard Yard; Dewan was collared on the steps of Winthrop House for the dubious crime of "distributing questionnaires without a permit."
"Funny," Operation Match's Walker recently recalled, "the last I heard you didn't need a permit to distribute questionnaires in a dorm."
For a while, it seemed like there might be room for two companies. At the time, Dewan told the Sarasota Journal: "The way I envision things, in 50 years computers may well have reduced our work week to zero hours. We'll date through computers, mate through computers, select our home with the help of computers, and plan our recreation with computers. It will be a fantastic time and my company and I hope to be a large part of it."
While Dewan turned out to be a visionary (he's still got four years for that zero-hour work week prediction to come through), his technological breakthrough didn't come without some personal lumps. He recently explained: "Back then I was going out with a girl from Wellesley. I gave her a free questionnaire because she helped me distribute in the dorms there. When we ran the survey through the computer, she and I matched. That was exciting! But I forgot that she also received five other matches, including a guy from Amherst, whom she later dumped me for."
In the end, neither company amounted to much: Dewan began winding down his computer dating service in 1967. As for Operation Match, Walker and his partners set up an office in New York, but struggled. "It was easier when we had a captive audience, people at single-sex colleges with time on their hands and high hormone levels," Walker says. "We all felt it was time to move on with real careers." Operation Match was bought by a student marketing company.
Of the original social network's cast of characters—which included Douglas Ginsburg, an Operation Match partner and presently a federal judge in D.C. who withdrew his Supreme Court nomination in 1987 after admitting to smoking marijuana—only Chris Walker, it seems, is still nagged by the old question: How can technology help people hook up? Walker was in New York in October to discuss his return, after a 45 year hiatus, to the online dating industry, or, as Walker puts it, "the electronically-intermediated introductions business."
Wearing a blue suit and an iPhone around his neck, Walker explained his new site, DatingStartsHere.com, an aggregator of online dating sites. In the same way that Kayak.com makes it possible to search airfares from the websites of several different airlines, DatingStartsHere aims to be the umbrella site of dating sites, potentially offering users the ability to search scores of sites at once. There's no algorithm that can forecast compatibility, Walker insists, so the best a dating site can do is provide its users with as many choices as possible.
"Whoever you are," Walker explains, "you meet somebody and you say, 'You know what? I like the way this person looks, I like the way she talks, and I'd like to spend some time with her—or maybe just the night.' Everyone looks forward to that! So if you can increase, even marginally, the chances of that happening, then you've had a good week, right? If it leads to marriage, great. If not, that's okay too."
Watch your back, Mr. Zuckerberg.