Judge Ginsburg (Author of the TikTok Divestiture Opinion) and His Own Foray into Social Technology

I hadn't known this until Emory law professor Matt Lawrence noted it on a discussion list, but here's an item from D.C. Circuit Judge Douglas Ginsburg's biography:

Judge Ginsburg left college for more than a year in the mid-1960's and founded a nationwide computer-dating service known as Operation Match. For a fee, the company arranged blind dates through the use of computerized data gathered from questionnaires….

It was apparently the first computerized dating service in the U.S.

Comments

[Voize of Reazon]

Later Ronald Reagan announced his intention to nominate Ginsburg to SCOTUS after Bork's nomination fell through, but Ginsburg withdrew from consideration only nine days later before he was officially nominated. He had publicly admitted smoking marijuana with his students when he was a law prof at Harvard and retreated from the press attention this attracted, so Reagan turned to his third choice Anthony Kennedy.

[Dr. Ed 2]

In the late 70s, a different "computer dating" service set up a male high school student with his female English teacher. Well, they were only about 10 years different in age, and lived in the same town...

With what computers were in the mid 1960s, it would be interesting to see what their sort and match criteria and ability was.

[Stupid Government Tricks]

I have this vision of it being run by punched card sorts. Lucy comes to mind, cards flying everywhere, thus students matched up with teachers.

[Dr. Ed 2]

I once walked across campus with a bundle of cards in my backpack -- it was about zero at the time.

The version I heard was that the cards were so cold that they pulled moisture out of the air and several stuck together -- either actually froze or there was enough moisture to do it.

Took down the card reader for quite a while and almost took down everything else.

[Stupid Government Tricks]

Almost all card readers at the time operated on what I call the throat and pick method. Cards were stacked vertically, with a "blade", 1/2 or 2/3 the thickness of a card, running in circles at the bottom of the stack to shove the back of the bottom card through a throat about 1.5 times the thickness of a card. If cards were wet and sticky, or swollen or otherwise unable to make it through the throat, you ended up with shredded and crumpled cards and a jammed reader which could be a real mess to clean out.

CDC had a much better design. The cards were fed horizontally on a vibrating plate, and the feeder was something which looked like a roll of toilet paper but was porous and sucked outside air in to peel off the front card and shove it through. I don't think it had a throat. Someone came in with a box whose cards were so swollen it could only hold 800 instead of 2000, and it read them without a hitch.

One day a psych student came in with cards from a survey. These were the kind you punched out with a pencil tip to mark the choices. Guess what happened when all that air pressure got hold of the first few cards .... chad all over like a snow storm. The operator stopped it, but probably 100 or so cards were trashed.

[Dr. Ed 2]

The operator knew me and that I wouldn't make a fuss about his judgement so he killed the job before it took out the whole system.

[John F. Carr]

I remember a campus computer dating service set up by a guy who would personally intervene to match himself with girls he wanted. The school newspaper wrote about it.

[Dr. Ed 2]

How did the school newspaper find out about it?

I remember various clubs who would give a flower to a girl for a nominal fee ($1 if I recall correctly) -- a great fund raiser in a more innocent age. And I heard that some girls sent them to themselves.

I, being evil, sent one to my sister (also a student on campus), signing it "someone you know" just to have her wondering....

[Stupid Government Tricks]

Boy, he's really dating himself!

Judge Ginsburg left college for more than a year in the mid-1960's and founded a nationwide computer-dating service...

[Dr. Ed 2]

Admitting to smoking pot with his students pretty much did it.

[B-Man]

I knew about Ginsburg's 1965 dating service, because I ran a computerized dating service for my high school Junior prom in 1967. Years later I wondered if it was the first, and came across Doug's. The computer I used was a CDC-6600 at NYU; and, yes, it was all done on punch cards. The computer actually was funded by NSA, through an arrangement with the AEC. (John von Neuman had been AEC chair, and this computer was a successor to the one he built at Princeton.) Another project that summer was to build a -- very primitive (punch cards, remember) -- generative language model, based on Noam Chomsky's 1957 generative grammar.