In the fall of 1962, Jeff Tarr, a teenager from a small town in Maine, began his freshman year at Harvard University. By the time he graduated, he had developed and launched the first-ever computer dating service, upending courting rituals at colleges across the US. The story of Operation Match is told in a new book, Operation Match: Jeff Tarr and the Invention of Computing Dating, written by Patsy Tarr and published by 2wice Books.
Pentagram’s Abbott Miller and team developed a highly visual book design that tells the Operation Match story against the backdrop of the cultural, sexual and technological revolution of the 1960s. The designers collaborated closely on the project with Patsy, who is married to Jeff and has a unique perspective on the subject––while she used Operation Match back in the day, Patsy met Jeff the old fashioned way: through a blind date.
Operation Match follows Jeff Tarr’s adventure from the dateless Saturday night that sparked his initial idea, through the process of perfecting a dating questionnaire, to late nights feeding thousands of punch cards into a rented IBM mainframe, to matching tens of thousands of young men and women, for better or for worse. It also traces his transformation from an awkward, Kennedy-loving college man to a voice of the New Frontier, appearing on the Today Show and the Tonight Show and, of course, having more dates than he could ever have dreamed of. There are parallels with Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook––another Harvard student who originally started his platform as a way to connect people.
Jeff Tarr’s innovation arrived in a nation whose campuses were still in step with 1950s notions of morality, propriety and tradition. For the Pentagram designers, the challenge was telling this story visually through a collage of elements in balance with the editorial. An extended photographic preamble at the beginning of the book helps set the stage for the period. The Pentagram team enlisted photo directors Luise Stauss and Genevieve Fussell to curate a lively mix of archival images for this illustrated history.
The design language of midcentury modernism evokes the period, with clean type and bright primary colors. Die cuts in the cover nod to the punch cards used to input information in the IBM computers of the 1960s. The book reproduces the original dating questionnaire in full, showing the range of questions applicants answered in search of their matches. The design team scanned the pages from Jeff Tarr’s archive, along with a plethora of press mentions and promotional materials.
Jeff Tarr likes to say Operation Match was all a fad, but his pioneering idea to turn matchmaking digital has endured, and dating apps are now a multibillion dollar industry worldwide. The book closes with a diagram that places Operation Match at the center of this growing galaxy of apps and social platforms that run the gamut from Match.com (not related), eHarmony, Hinge, Tinder and OkCupid to services that serve more niche audiences, like Grindr, J Date, Christian Connection, Our Time and Raya. (Computer matchmaking seems to run in the family; one of Tarr’s nephews was a co-founder of okCupid.)
Another coda features a family album of couples who met through Operation Match; one comments, “Operation Match created my life, in a sense. Our grandchildren wouldn’t exist without two sets of computers.”
Operation Match is the inaugural book of Patsy Tarr’s new venture, 2wice Books. The project is also the latest in Miller’s 30-year collaboration with Patsy and the 2wice Arts Foundation, following the design of Dance Ink and 2wice magazines, the 2wice website, and a range of apps, books and exhibitions.
