Free Modern Romance by Aziz Ansari, Eric Klinenberg Page B

long-term relationships. Two hundred of those will get married, and many of them will have kids. 1
    THE RISE OF ONLINE DATING . . .
    Online dating has its origins in the 1960s, with the emergence of the first computer dating services. These services claimed that they could leverage the new power of computers to help the luckless in love find their soul mate in a rational, efficient manner. They asked clients to fill out long questionnaires, the answers to which they would enter into computers the size of living rooms. (Well, not all the services did this. Apparently one, Project Flame at Indiana University, got students to fill out computer punch cards and then, rather than put them in the computer, the scientists shuffled the deck and created a faked match.) The computer would chew on the data and, based on whatever primitive algorithm had been entered into it, spit out two theoretically compatible clients, who would then be sent on a date. 2
    These services hung around in various forms throughout the 1980s, but they never really caught on. There were a few good reasons for their failure. One was pretty simple: Not many people had personal computers at home, or even at work, and the idea that some strange machine was going to identify the perfect partner was just weird. After thousands of years of dating and mating without electronic assistance, most people resisted the idea that the answer to finding true love was to consult a bulky IBM. There was also another big reason people didn’t flock to computer matchmakers: The companies that ran them couldn’t show that they knew what made two people good romantic partners, and no one had evidence that the systems actually worked. Finally, there was a strong stigma attached to computer dating, and most people considered using machines for this purpose a sign of romantic desperation.
    Classified ads, not matchmaking machines, were the medium of choice for singles looking for new ways to connect during the 1980s and early 1990s. The genre was actually invented in the 1690s, and by the eighteenth century matrimonial advertising had become a flourishing part of the newspaper business. 3 The ads really took off after the sexual revolution of the 1960s, when men and women alike were emboldened to seek new ways to meet people. Decades before Craigslist, the “Personals” sections of daily and, especially, weekly newspapers were full of action, particularly in the “thin markets” such as among LGBT folks and middle-aged (usually divorced) and older straight people.
    The ads were very brief, generally under fifty words, and would lead with a bold, all-caps heading that would attempt to grab people’s attention, anything from STRAWBERRY BLONDE to LONELY GUY! to SURPRISE ME or even just MY NAME IS WILLIE!
    Then the person would quickly describe themselves and what they were looking for or in search of (ISO). In order to save space, people used abbreviations, like SWM (single white male), SJF (single Jewish female), SBPM (single black professional male), and, of course, DASP (divorced Asian saxophone player.)
    You would usually get a certain amount of space for free and then would have to pay for more space. For instance, in the
L.A. Times
you got four lines for free and then paid eight dollars per line afterward.
    Here are some ads from the
Beaver County Times
in December 1994, just months before the first online dating site emerged:

    After the ads were placed, interested parties would call a toll-based 900 number and leave a message in that person’s mailbox. The cost of leaving these messages hovered around $1.75 per minute, and the average call lasted about three minutes. You would listen to the person’s outgoing message and then leave your voice mail, and you even had the option to listen and rerecord if you wanted. The person who placed the ad would go through the messages and contact those people they were interested in.
    With no photos and so little information to go off