Before you download a dating app, swipe left, or even ask Google to suggest the best online dating service, take a minute to understand and appreciate where it all started.
The woman you have to thank for online dating services is Joan Ball.
Joan Ball is among the key technological architects of modern life. While her work has largely gone unheard, her contribution has shaped an important part of modern life: online dating.
Joan was a computer dating pioneer who started the first computer dating service in England, in 1964.
While a group of men at Harvard are credited for the first computerized dating service known as ‘Operation Match.’ It was a woman who first devised a way to determine the compatibility of this service using a computer.
Her journey to becoming a pioneer in the online dating service started after she founded the Eros Friendship Bureau Ltd in 1962. It is while operating this business that she discovered she was good at helping people make connections. The company focused on long-term relationships that would end in marriage.
In 1964, Joan changed the name of her dating service bureau to the St. James Computer Dating Service and proceeded to run first set of computer matchups in the same year.
Joan would later merge her company with another woman-led marriage bureau to form Com-Pat, or Computer Dating Services Ltd.
In 1970, Com-Pat Two was launched. The company had a competitive advantage over similar companies as it used the most advanced matching system created at the time.
The system used a questionnaire and gave a list of four of the top matches at the end.
It translated survey answers about what a prospective lover did not want in a partner to punch cards. Joan would then run these cards through a time-shared computer. Her program would then reveal the “match” in the system, and service users would receive the name and address of their match.
In short, Tinder and OkCupid have Joan Ball to thank.
Early life
Joan Ball was born in 1934 to a poor, working-class family.
At only five years old, World War II started and this resulted in her being evacuated from London to the countryside to escape the war. During this time, she was separated from her family thus foster homes become her reality.
Foster home life was never a bed of roses, each foster family was different and she was sexually harassed by one of the families with whom she lived. When the war ended, she reunited with her family in England.
Ball was dyslexic and struggled in school.
She was officially diagnosed in 1973, at the age of 39. Life as a dyslexic was not easy at school and home since she was taunted and ridiculed, even by her own mother. She went through most of her life suffering from the reading disorder.
Joan Ball is a bonafide pioneer in the online dating service. While women’s many contributions to technology have, in the past, gone unsung, times are slowly changing. Existing and emerging Women founders and leaders in the tech sector have somehow challenged us to look at the female gender differently. This has also come with the realization that technology is not a man’s domain, there are numerous women who have made notable contributions: Joan Ball is one among them.
Very interesting