Monday, October 2, 2017

Computer Love


You all may have noticed over the past two and a half years that Rob and I kind of have a thing for the history of technology. I mean, okay, it's literally Rob's job and as for me, well, I think everyone knows that I love me some retrotech. So it's probably not surprising that with the computer dating-related plot of this week's Les-centric episode, "I'll Take Romance," Rob and I maybe went a little bit overboard in looking at the history of computer dating.

We had to cut a good 8 to 10 minutes from our discussion on the history of computer dating, video dating, and internet dating but we wanted to share some of the links we talk about (and some of the ones we cut) in our Monday post to whet your appetite for Wednesday's episode.

Computer Dating:

Operation Match at Harvard received all the media hype back in the mid-'60s, but computer dating was happening all over the US, UK, and elsewhere. This video from 538 and ESPN talks a lot about the Harvard boys and a little bit about some of the other university computer dating clubs around in the mid-'60s. But in this week's podcast we'll also give some of the other major competitors to Harvard's "Computer Date Zero" crown their due, including Joan Ball from East London.

Video Dating:

We clipped our 1980s video dating discussion from the episode, but I think folks should definitely take the time to check out a couple of sample montages of 1980s video dating. Also, we mentioned this on our Facebook pages ages ago, but Jan Smithers starred in a pilot for an unproduced romance anthology series based around video dating called The Love Tapes.

Internet Dating:

Cringe along with me through this Computer Chronicles episode from 1997 where they discuss "cyber dating." Knowing that my first real relationship, begun over IRC for goodness sakes in 1995, had come and gone by the time this aired on PBS is alternately humbling and troubling.

And, as a soundtrack for your link surfing, here's Kraftwerk with their ode to "data dates," "Computer Love."


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