the notes for each reading will be prefaced by the full citation for the article and include the thesis of the reading (The thesis will appear near the top of the page and be marked as “Thesis:”).
Notes should be at least one full typed single-spaced page and include an outline of arguments, indication of how original research is deployed, and quotes from interesting or confusing passages. All quotes should be identified as such and students must produce these notes individually. One must be done on the intro to “Living a Feminist Life” and the second must be on “Feminism is Sensational” which is also a chapter in the book by Sara Ahmed.
. The other 2 are Pdfs uploaded and I do not have access to the book for the other 2. Can you still make it work?
Computer Dating in the Classifieds: Complicating the
Cultural History of Matchmaking by Machine
Bo Ruberg
Information & Culture, Volume 57, Number 3, 2022, pp. 235-254 (Article)
Published by University of Texas Press
For additional information about this article
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/869006
[ Access provided at 19 May 2023 17:59 GMT from Tulane University ]
Computer Dating in the
Classifieds: Complicating
the Cultural History of
Matchmaking by Machine
BO RUBERG
C
“
OMPUTER MATE IS NOT A DATING
GAME,” reads the headline of an advertisement featured in the classified section of the
January 2, 1969, issue of the Village Voice,
an alternative weekly newspaper based in
New York City’s East Village.1 “We successfully find partners
for matrimony and compatible friendships. Absolutely confidential. . . . Write or phone for free questionnaire” (figure 1).
Positioned beneath a listing for a weight-loss dance class and
another for a Vietnam peace vigil, this message from the company Computer Mate was far from the only one promoting
matchmaking services in that week’s paper. Along with a motley array of advertisements offering opportunities to meet “the
right people” or mingle with “above average singles,” a second
ad for matchmaking by machine proclaims: “MEET YOUR
IDEAL MATE (Computer Dating Service) . . . [We have] been
successfully matching people, all over the country, for 3 years.
Send for FREE Questionnaire.”2 These are only some of the
numerous advertisements for the phenomenon known as
“computer dating” that appeared in the Village Voice, as well
as in numerous other newspapers across the United States,
on a regular basis in the 1960s and 1970s. Among a cacophony
of ads, many of which also relate to sexuality and romance,
what jumps out from the pages of the classified section to a
contemporary reader is the seemingly anachronistic promise
that computers can be used to find love.
When we think of classified ads today—those short, iconic advertisements at the back of print newspapers—it is
unlikely that we think about computers. In the second decade
of the twenty-first century, the classifieds have come to represent a quaint, bygone, predigital era of media communication, an era when people paid by the line to advertise job
Bo Ruberg, PhD, is an associate professor in the Department of
Film and Media Studies at the University of California, Irvine.
Their most recent book is Sex Dolls at Sea: Imagined Histories of
Sexual Technologies (MIT Press, 2022).
Information & Culture, Vol. 57, no. 3, 2022
© 2022 by the University of Texas Press
DOI: 10.7560/IC57301
ABSTRACT:
This article looks at the
phenomenon of computer
dating through its appearance in the classified
ads of the Village Voice.
Popular between the late
1960s and mid-1970s,
computer dating services
used questionnaire data
to match singles. Highlighting new perspectives
drawn from the classifieds, this article offers a
cultural history of computer dating in the United
States, charting its rise
and fall and the shifting
public sentiments around
it. The article argues that
computer dating should
be understood as a media
phenomenon and demonstrates how computer
dating ads complicate
teleological narratives
about contemporary dating technologies, offering
an alternative history of
how computers became
“personal.”
KEYWORDS:
computer dating, online
dating, classified ads,
technology, media,
romance, sexuality
FIGURE 1. The opening page of the Voice Classified section from the January 2,
1969, edition of the Village Voice, featuring an advertisement for the computer dating service Computer Mate.
openings or rent out apartments or seek romantic partners. Though many contemporary
local newspapers still continue to print classified ads, they have become associated in
the popular imaginary with a time before the internet, that is, before the rise of the
personal computer fostered the creation of newer, more corporate platforms for buying,
selling, and connecting online. As Jessa Lingel writes in An Internet for the People, her
historical study of Craigslist, those digital spaces that most closely mirror the informal
marketplaces of print classified sections are now characterized precisely by their aura of
obsolescence and nostalgia. Today, sites such as Craigslist, which have long epitomized
the translation of the classifieds to the internet, are “lonely outposts” preserving the last
remnants of an “older ethos of online life.”3 In this sense, we might be tempted to envision classified ads in opposition to the rise of digital cultures, seeing the classifieds as a
medium that has been replaced, or at least profoundly transformed, by the entrance of
computers into everyday life.
Yet as I demonstrate here, the history of the classified ads is inextricably bound up with
the history of computers. Long before computers themselves entered the home, they entered the classifieds, arriving in domestic spaces as part of local newspapers. Throughout
the 1950s and 1960s, the classifieds served as artifacts reflecting the gendered nature of
technological work. Ads in the Village Voice during this time (which were broken down
into separate Help Wanted Female and Help Wanted Male sections) attest to the midtwentieth-century sense of computing as women’s work, with regular calls for “housewives” and other women to take up office jobs with titles ranging from “switchboard
operator” to “comptometer operator” to “code clerk.” As an archive for historians, such
ads have the potential to complement and extend existing research on women’s place in
computing history by scholars such as Janet Abbate, Mar Hicks, Laine Nooney, Joy Lisi
Rankin, Elizabeth Bruton, and Claire Lisa Evans.4 However, if we look back to the classified sections of American regional print newspapers, especially those papers published
in the 1960s and 1970s, we find that arguably the most striking presence of computers in
these ads is of a different sort: those promoting computerized dating services.
236 BO RUBERG
This article looks at the interplay between the classifieds and what is known as computer dating, a phenomenon that came to prominence in the United States in roughly
the mid-1960s and declined in the late 1970s. As Mar Hicks explains in their 2016 article
“Computer Love: Replicating Social Order Through Early Computer Dating Systems,”
computer dating was an early form of matchmaking by machine offered by a number of
companies, including those in both America and the United Kingdom.5 These companies
claimed to pair would-be daters with well-suited matches using the precision of computational technology. Often posited as an early precursor to online dating, computer dating did share many features with the dating websites and mobile apps of today. Hicks
explains how the heteronormative ideologies that continue to shape online dating were
also reflected in (and codified through) the questionnaires of computer dating services.
Hicks argues that rather than revolutionizing romance, as many have claimed, this early
form of computer-mediated matchmaking reinscribed dominant norms around marriage,
contributing to the larger project of encoding discriminatory attitudes into technological systems.6 There are also parallels between the cultural perceptions that surrounded
computer dating and those around online dating today, both of which have been variously
celebrated and decried. As Moira Weigel writes in Labor of Love: The Invention of Dating, the question of how people date has been a matter of moral panic throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with each new generation insisting that dating is in crisis.7
This continual crisis is itself closely bound up with technology not just in the current day
but also across history, as the case of computer dating makes clear.
The present work builds on existing scholarship by offering an alternate way to make
sense of computer dating not so much as an actual set of computational or corporate practices (what really happened in the business of computer dating) but rather as a media
phenomenon. While only a comparatively small percentage of Americans may have actually tried computer dating during its heyday (the subscription numbers for such services
are highly suspect, as we will discuss), many more would have encountered computer dating through its representation in media. Thus, these representations of computer dating,
predominantly found in advertisements and news reporting, can be understood as key to
shaping the popular imaginary around computer dating and, in turn, broader notions about
the relationship between computers, romance, and sexuality. This research focuses on
advertisements for computer dating in American periodicals, especially ads found in classified sections of regional newspapers, where such ads were particularly prevalent. Methodologically, this piece builds from an established tradition of scholarship that approaches
advertisements as windows onto culture, as seen in work such as Chris Wharton’s.8 In
particular, it joins a network of writing that addresses computer history through advertisements, including early work by William Aspray and Donald Beaver and more recent
scholarship on sexism in video game magazine advertisements by Graeme Kirkpatrick.9
As I explain below, I have chosen to focus my research in the online archives of the
Village Voice because this newspaper represents a particularly rich site within the history
of the classifieds. Though the Village Voice is often associated with LGBTQ+ culture in
the present day, it should be understood as reaching a broader, largely straight (though
admittedly still “alternative”) audience during the period in question.
Through the classifieds, this research surfaces a nuanced cultural history of computer
dating, charting its rise and fall and mapping the shifting attitudes that surrounded the
phenomenon. At the same time, the picture of computer dating that emerges here challenges dominant teleological narratives about the ascendance of digital technologies and
Computer Dating in the Classifieds
237
their changing role in contemporary romance. It demonstrates how computer dating,
even in its heyday, existed within a packed and varied ecosystem of dating technologies
and how computer dating eventually fell away in favor of other technologies that we would
now consider less advanced. In ads for computer dating, we see not only the early datafication of romance but also critiques of data avant la lettre, an anxious, ambivalent vision
that challenges the assumption that computer dating can be understood as “online dating
before online dating.” Computer dating’s appearances in the classifieds also offers up an
alternate history of what Laine Nooney has described as “how the computer became personal.”10 These ads suggest that, long before the introduction of the personal computer, it
was quite literally personals ads (a subgenre of the classifieds) that prompted Americans
to envision computers as personal: not hulking machines accessible only to highly trained
professionals in elite military or academic institutions but rather tools that could play a
part in the intimate operations of Americans’ everyday lives.
COMPUTER DATING:
HISTORICAL PHENOMENON, MEDIA PHENOMENON
Decades before the rise of what we now think of as online dating, computer dating
was the practice of using computers to match potential romantic partners. Broadly speaking, the term refers to commercial services offered by an array of companies largely based
in the United States and the United Kingdom. Some of these companies owned their own
dedicated computers, while others operated via rented time on a variety of machines;
among those mentioned in reporting and advertising are the Honeywell 200, IBM 360/40,
and IBM 7094.11 The earliest computer-assisted matchmaking can be traced to university experiments in the late 1950s, with the first English-language commercial computer
dating services emerging in 1964 in the United Kingdom and 1965 in the United States.12
Mid-twentieth-century computer dating services primarily operated via questionnaires: daters filled out protoprofiles about themselves and their romantic interests and mailed those
profiles to dating companies, which charged a fee to provide daters with relevant matches.
On the companies’ end, these customer questionnaires were translated into punch cards,
processed as data, and paired via expert calculations—or at least so the companies claimed.
In reality, as accounts from some customers attest, the matches produced via computer dating may have been just as disappointing as those produced without the help of a machine.13
The details of the computer dating industry vary by account. The two best-known
American computer dating services were Operation Match, which was started by a pair
of students from Harvard and an outside collaborator, and Contact, started by a student
at MIT.14 However, there were also many more such companies. Their services and costs
ranged greatly. Some companies reportedly charged as little as $3 and others as much as
$500; similarly, their offerings varied from a one-time list of potential matches to a fiveyear ongoing membership.15 American media representation of computer dating, such as
that found in news reports and advertisements, suggests that the phenomenon can be broken down into two main periods. In 1965 and 1966, when computer dating first emerged
as a public practice in the United States, it was associated with undergraduate students,
particularly those in all-men’s or all-women’s colleges.16 From 1967 to roughly the mid1970s, computer dating was seen as a service aimed toward a wider range of people, especially but not limited to singles between the ages of eighteen and thirty-five living in urban
spaces.17 Across this period, computer dating was targeted primarily at heterosexual people.
238 BO RUBERG
Problematic issues of race remained largely implicit in computer dating, though the coded
language of many computer dating advertisements and questionnaires suggests that computer dating may have been used primarily by white daters seeking other white daters.
While the intake questionnaires used by various computer dating services differed, most
featured questions about personality, beliefs, and traits of a potential romantic match.
Some explicitly allowed respondents to select and exclude partners according to factors
such as height, body type, age, nationality, and religion.18 More expensive services reportedly also required in-depth personal interviews, character references, and even medical
checkups.19 The role that actual computers played in computer dating is itself surprisingly
murky. Some dating services described using computers to sort through large databases
and pair daters with their ideal matches.20 Others painted a picture of their computers as
highly programmed matchmakers capable of a kind of machine learning.21 However, some
companies that represented themselves as computer dating services did not use computers at all, attaching themselves to the wave of computer dating in name only.22 It is also
difficult to determine the true popularity of computer dating services, that is, the extent
to which US daters actually used these services. In the advertisements discussed below,
owners of computer dating companies report having anywhere between a few thousand
to three and a half million registered clients. Those numbers are suspect at best, however,
since the number of enrolled singles that a company had on file was itself a major selling
point for drawing new members, an issue that persists in online dating today.23
Whatever the true specificities of the computer dating industry, the phenomenon came
to life not just through the actual practices of matchmaking by machine but also through
the cultural perception of computer dating. For every American who actually tried computer dating, many more would have seen news stories and advertisements related to the
practice. During the 1960s and 1970s, many articles about computer dating appeared in
widely circulated publications. These articles serve as windows onto the shifting ways
that computer dating was imagined within a broader culture context. For example, a 1966
cover story for the magazine Look paints a picture of computer dating as a fun new fad
among college students, especially wealthy white students at “elite,” noncoeducational
institutions (figure 2). The article follows two students who were matched up via computer
dating, Nancy from Smith College and Nikos from Yale, as they meet for a romantic New
York City weekend. While some experts in the article express skepticism about the ability of computers to make successful matches (“Until body chemistry can be inputted into
the computer,” the director of the Yale Computer Center is quoted as saying, “I have my
doubts concerning the efficacy of the method”), there is no sign of social stigma associated
with computer dating.24
Just one year later, in a 1967 article in Life magazine, we see that computer dating had
moved beyond college campuses and out into the general population. With this shift came
a negative attitude toward computer dating. Though the Life article describes computer
dating as a phenomenon “growing as sturdily as the price of a share of IBM,” it also
claims: “Couples who meet by computer tend to be embarrassed and even hostile. . . .
Drinking takes care of the embarrassment but not the hostility. ‘You needed a computer,
did you? So what’s wrong with you?’ a man sneers at the end of an evening.”25 This depiction of computer dating as matchmaking for bitter singles contrasts with other forms of
dating described in the same Life issue, which includes a large feature about the tantalizing ways that singles were meeting during the swinging sixties.26 Juxtaposed against
images of beautiful young people flirting at poolside parties, this indictment of computer
Computer Dating in the Classifieds
239
FIGURE 2. The cover of the February
22, 1969, issue of Look magazine with a
photo of Nancy and Nikos, college students participating in “the big college
craze,” dating by computer.
dating suggests that some saw the practice as the sad, awkward cousin of other romantic trends of the day (figure 3).
In its later years, the image of computer dating took yet another turn for the worse. In
1978 an article in the financial magazine Changing Times portrayed computer dating as a
shady business. Citing the experience of a dater who apparently paid twenty-five dollars to
a computing dating service that matched her only with men too far away to date, the article
states that, as the computer dating business ballooned, so too did “rip-offs . . . in the form
of misleading ads and deceptive sales practices.” Though the article asserts that “several
hundred” computer dating services still remained in operation, it also suggests that these
services were fast on the decline, buckling under the popular conception that “computerized
matchmaking [was] a last-ditch effort to find companionship.” In place of computer dating, the Changing Times article describes a new wave in matchmaking services: dating via
video, a trend that I discuss below. The author states, “Daters who have tried videotaping
say it is the best arrangement because you get a good idea of what a person is really like, and
it limits chances of encountering someone with annoying mannerisms that a computer would
fail to spot.”27 Thus, these articles show us how computer dating shifted over the course of
roughly a decade and a half from a sweet if curious news item to, quite literally, “old news.”
COMPUTER DATING IN THE CLASSIFIEDS
Even more prominent than magazine articles among media representations of
computer dating was advertising. During this period, computer dating as an actual
practice came to blur with the seemingly ubiquitous ads for computer dating services.
240 BO RUBERG
FIGURE 3. A tantalizing 1967 Life
magazine article about in-person
dating in the swinging sixties is juxtaposed with an article about the disappointments of online dating.
A 1969 article in Teen magazine titled “Love—Computer Style: Are You Ready for It?”
(figure 4) opens by mimicking the familiar promises of such ads: “Are you lonely? Bored?
. . . Well, it’s not your fault your life is dull!!” The article describes how “computer dating
ads reach out to the lonely from newspapers, magazines, billboards—and even 24-hour
recorded telephone messages. . . . ‘Don’t make a mistake! Let science take the risk out of
romance!’ the ads insist.”28 This article evidences a shared sense of the near ubiquity of
computer dating advertisements, as well as the sense that such ads used a striking (even
absurd) set of rhetorical tactics that arguably loomed larger in the public consciousness
than computer dating itself.
Advertisements for computer dating took a number of forms, including some larger ads
in newspapers and magazines. These ads offer insights into how more prominent computer dating companies framed their services, often with a focus on the datafication of dating and the allure of high-tech romance. One such ad, for a company called Compatibility,
featured the bold-font promise, “You can meet more single people this coming year, highly
compatible with you, than you have probably met in your entire lifetime” (figure 5). Next
to this, the company printed a full copy of their “Compatibility Personality Inventory,”
the questionnaire for new computer daters, which included no fewer than fifty questions.
The advertising copy continues: “Thousands are already enjoying the benefits of dating
people who are as close to being ideal for one another as modern technology can determine. Using the most advanced and sophisticated computer techniques with the IBM
360/40, COMPATIBILITY can GUARANTEE you 2 to 10 compatible referrals every 30
days for five full years. Fill out the Personality Inventory. We’ll score it for you. Then
Computer Dating in the Classifieds
241
FIGURE 4. In July 1969 the magazine
Teen featured a story titled “Love—
Computer Style: Are You Ready for It?,”
listed here on the issue’s cover.
you’ll see what the Compatible Computer that is used for us can do for single adults.”29
Here, we see an example of how computer dating companies traded on public perceptions
of computers as “advanced” and “sophisticated,” promising the most ideal matches that
“modern technology” could provide. The ad assures readers that the humans who work
for Compatibility play a minimal role, simply scoring questionnaires, while the “Compatible Computer” itself takes on the role of matchmaker.
Though they offer rich opportunities for analysis, larger one-off advertisements of this
sort in magazines and newspapers actually accounted for a small percentage of computer
dating ads. Such ads appeared far more frequently and in far greater variety in more
abbreviated forms in the classified sections of newspapers. Computer dating services
were advertised widely in US newspapers across a range of geographic locations and
readerships. As a media form, classified advertisements have their own histories and
norms.30 They have long been associated with sexuality and romance through the tradition of advertising in the “personals,” though the distinctions between categories within
the classifieds and indeed the category of the “classifieds” itself have not been stable over
the course of time. Even in the case of an individual paper such as the Village Voice, the
archives reveal that the materials that eventually became the classifieds shifted multiple
times before they settled into the structured genre that we know today.
Classified ads offer unique affordances as an archive for exploring the cultural history
of computer dating. Because they were relatively inexpensive, they reflect a more diverse
array of businesses than magazine advertisements, allowing us to get a fuller picture of
the commercial terrain of computer dating, including the many small-scale computer
242 BO RUBERG
FIGURE 5. An advertisement from 1970 for the computer dating
service Compatibility that includes the company’s full “personality
inventory” questionnaire.
dating services that cropped up during the height of the phenomenon. The contents of
classified sections, especially those in regional newspapers, are often hyperlocal. For this
reason, they give a richer snapshot of the factors that converged around computer dating
in varying locales. The classifieds also offer a usefully granular temporality. When they
appear in weekly or even daily newspapers, they allow us to construct timelines that
account for fast-paced shifts in both technology and public sentiment.
Of all the US newspapers to turn to for an analysis of the classifieds, there are few
better suited than the Village Voice. Across its run from 1955 to 2018, the Village Voice
remained closely tied to the urban countercultures that grew up around New York City.31
While LGBTQ+ issues became central to the Village Voice’s reporting in its later decades,
it offered more general coverage of “alternative” perspectives in the mid-twentieth century. Over time, the classifieds grew to constitute a sizable portion of the Village Voice. In
the paper’s first issue, published on October 26, 1955, the Voice Classified section took up
less than half a page.32 By 1975 the classified section had ballooned to twenty pages. These
ads placed threads of various cultural movements alongside evidence of everyday life in
New York. Reports from the time also suggest that New York City was a hub for computer
dating services.33 In addition, the Village Voice’s reputation as an alternative paper made
it an ideal venue for advertising computer dating, especially during a period when the
Computer Dating in the Classifieds
243
phenomenon was associated with shifting attitudes toward romance and sex, as evidenced
by the Life articles described above.
Classified ads have been particularly important in the popular perception of the Village
Voice as well. In the mid-2000s, when I was working as a technology journalist, I spent a
brief stint as a Village Voice staff writer. By that time, the paper had become synonymous
with its scandalous back page—the finale of its robust classified section, which typically
featured full-color ads for local sex workers. The paper had recently been bought by a
media conglomerate on a mission to “clean up the back page.” What I found was that,
whether people loved them or bemoaned them, the classifieds were what first came to
mind for many people when they thought of the Village Voice.
THE RISE AND FALL OF COMPUTER DATING
The classifieds offer us a number of new perspectives on the historical phenomenon of computer dating. First among these is a more nuanced vision of the rise and fall
of computer dating: when it first appeared as a commercial service in America, when it
became popular, when it fell out of fashion, and what finally drove it out of the classifieds
altogether. The year 1965 marked the founding of both Operation Match and Contact, the
two prominent US computer dating companies mentioned above. Yet it was not until two
years later, in 1967, that advertisements for computer dating services began appearing in
the Village Voice. One of the first of such ads, placed by a company called TEAM Project,
appeared in the February 2, 1967, issue: “MEET YOUR IDEAL MATE (All Ages)
Through TEAM Project. Computerized Dating Service. ‘Let TEAM make you a team.’”34
Another add from a second company, this one from the July 6, 1967, issue, reads:
“COMPU-TELL’S DATA DATING (computer matching). ‘You furnish the data—we furnish the date.’ Send for FREE questionnaire.”35 A number of the computer dating ads
that began appearing during this time ran in the classifieds each week for years, often
with only small tweaks in copy. The appearance of these ads demarcates the early days of
computer dating for a general audience. It also reflects the growing pool of computer dating companies (such as TEAM Project and Compu-Tell) beyond the big names that remain
most prominent in recorded histories of computer dating.
The years 1969 and 1970 represent the height of computer dating in the classified section of the Village Voice. During those years, both the overall volume of computer dating advertisements and the number of individual companies advertising their services
were at their peak. In fact, so many companies are represented that it is challenging to
keep track of the ever-growing, ever-changing roster. There’s Comodat (“COMPUTER
DATING WORKS!!”); there’s Selectra-Date (“IF YOUR LAST DATE WAS A BORE
and also the one before, it’s time you tried Selectra-Date, New York’s largest and most
experienced computer-dating service”); there’s Icebreaker, Inc. (“COMPUTER DATING
PAR EXCELLENCE. Uses Social Science Expertise. Members are largely progressive,
professional people. Fun and inexpensive”).36 Some ads attempt to distinguish themselves
by boasting the largest pool of members. Others claim to have a stronger track record of
matching now-married couples. In addition to advertising in the classified section, some
computer dating services also took out small block ads that appeared in separate side columns—an attempt to stand out on a packed, noisy page. How this proliferation of computer dating services relates to larger cultural shifts taking place in 1969 and 1970 remains
an open question. We might equally see computer dating as an extension of increasingly
244 BO RUBERG
liberal cultural norms around sexuality and romance or as a kind of backlash in response
to these shifting norms, a way of dating that promised the opportunity to carefully calibrate whom one will meet, marry, or sleep with.
By late 1972, only five years after ads for computer dating began populating the pages of the Village Voice, the classified section shows us that computer dating was on the
decline. Throughout 1972 a handful of longtime advertisers continue to crop up, such as
Selectra-Date, TEAM Project, and Icebreaker, Inc. In general, though, ads for dating services, both computerized and noncomputerized, thin out around this time. The computer
dating ads that do appear in these years take on a notably defensive tone, presumably in
response to a downward turn in popular sentiment. Many such ads reflect efforts on the
part of various companies to differentiate, explain, and legitimize themselves in contrast
to other computer dating services. For instance, by the May 4, 1972, issue of the Village
Voice, TEAM Project had begun including clauses in its ads assuring potential customers
that the company had a “legitimate office in Manhattan,” as if the presence of a brickand-mortar operation might assuage concerns about whether computer dating itself was
a questionable practice.37 In a similar vein, a surprisingly long-winded ad (remembering
that classifieds were paid for by the inch) from the computer dating service Phase 2 that
appeared in the January 25, 1974, issue insisted: “ALL DATING SERVICES ARE NOT
CREATED EQUAL. . . . Some use computers—most don’t. . . . There are also wide differences in integrity.”38 Reflected in these ads is a shifting sense, represented here in the
classifieds but echoing out beyond them, that computer dating was no longer seen as exciting, new, and innovative but rather as an increasingly dubious business.
The true end of computer dating in the classifieds comes in 1978, when advertisements
in the Village Voice had all but petered out entirely. Interestingly, the final disappearance
of computer dating from the Village Voice coincides with two other notable changes in
the paper’s classified section. The first is the codification of the personal ads, which by
mid-1976 had been broken out into their own subsection from the general classified ads
(previously they had been grouped, along with dating services, into