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You know what's weird? I met my future wife online at college via a PARTI (PARTICIPATE, a terminal based messaging system running on PR1MOS that allowed a form

You know what's weird? I met my future wife online at college via a PARTI (PARTICIPATE, a terminal based messaging system running on PR1MOS that allowed a form of effectively real-time chatting and pseudonyms) in college...in the mid 1980s. So in most of the 1980s and into the 1990s, I couldn't really effectively answer the "how did you meet" question because that wasn't yet a thing yet. ("On the computer" wasn't really satisfactory before people had a notion of "online".) And when it was more technically explainable, it was sort of seedy because there was so little that was local or social about it. So the discovery, decades later, of people meeting online, of social media, of dating sites, of changing screen names to reflect your mood...that all seemed ancient in a way. The only thing left is to watch it go by, to be rediscovered again by those new to computers...

danellis 12y ago
"So in most of the 1980s and into the 1990s, I couldn't really effectively answer the "how did you meet" question because that wasn't yet a thing yet." But Jumpin' Jack Flash came out in 1986!
cbd1984 12y ago
> "On the computer" Oh, computer dating, where you input your statistics and the computer picks the logically perfect match. Nah, it'll never catch on. (Remember that idea?)
- greggarious 12y ago
  It still exists. It's called "OKCupid".
  - 88e282102ae2e5b 12y ago
    cbd1984's comment was a joke.
  - sukilot 12y ago
    The "matching" part of OK cupid is a joke/gimmick, though. It's accuracy level is not really well correlated to the site success. They even showed that once when they intentionally flipped the match scores
greggarious 12y ago
>So in most of the 1980s and into the 1990s, I couldn't really effectively answer the "how did you meet" question because that wasn't yet a thing yet. ("On the computer" wasn't really satisfactory before people had a notion of "online".) And when it was more technically explainable, it was sort of seedy because there was so little that was local or social about it. That's really interesting. At one point I interned at PARC, and we were looking at making some sort of privacy protecting online dating service. (E.g. your data is encrypted, only decryped when two people match) But after the initial set of interviews I did, I found most people were more concerned with trust - is the information on this profile accurate? They couldn't care less if people are using online dating. Which surprised some of my colleagues. Section 3.3 of our paper details this if anyone is interested in more detail: http://www.kisc.meiji.ac.jp/~ethicj/USEC13/submissions/usec13_submission_05.pdf http://www.kisc.meiji.ac.jp/~ethicj/USEC13/submissions/usec1...)

danellis 12y ago

"So in most of the 1980s and into the 1990s, I couldn't really effectively answer the "how did you meet" question because that wasn't yet a thing yet." But Jumpin' Jack Flash came out in 1986!

cbd1984 12y ago

> "On the computer" Oh, computer dating, where you input your statistics and the computer picks the logically perfect match. Nah, it'll never catch on. (Remember that idea?)

greggarious 12y ago
It still exists. It's called "OKCupid".
- 88e282102ae2e5b 12y ago
  cbd1984's comment was a joke.
- sukilot 12y ago
  The "matching" part of OK cupid is a joke/gimmick, though. It's accuracy level is not really well correlated to the site success. They even showed that once when they intentionally flipped the match scores

greggarious 12y ago

>So in most of the 1980s and into the 1990s, I couldn't really effectively answer the "how did you meet" question because that wasn't yet a thing yet. ("On the computer" wasn't really satisfactory before people had a notion of "online".) And when it was more technically explainable, it was sort of seedy because there was so little that was local or social about it. That's really interesting. At one point I interned at PARC, and we were looking at making some sort of privacy protecting online dating service. (E.g. your data is encrypted, only decryped when two people match) But after the initial set of interviews I did, I found most people were more concerned with trust - is the information on this profile accurate? They couldn't care less if people are using online dating. Which surprised some of my colleagues. Section 3.3 of our paper details this if anyone is interested in more detail: http://www.kisc.meiji.ac.jp/~ethicj/USEC13/submissions/usec13_submission_05.pdf http://www.kisc.meiji.ac.jp/~ethicj/USEC13/submissions/usec1...)