Additional Capital
Despite relative successes in San Francisco and New York, over the whole country Operation Match had incurred a sizable loss, and they were going to need additional capital to keep going. Somehow, Tarr and company found a New York firm--Data Processing, Inc.--who agreed to support them financially. Tarr and Crump had been joined at the end of the spring by Ginsburg, who had dropped out of Cornell ("Out of boredom," Tarr says) during the spring term. By mid summer, Vaugh Morrill had lost interest and had decided to leave the corporation. Therefore, under the present arrangement, Tarr, Crump, and Ginsburg are the three principle stock holders.
Ginsburg, the non-student of the three has been doing most of the work this fall as manager of the Compatibility Research offices on Central Square. The offices are unadorned except for five long tables. At these tables three secretaries work to cut and pencil their way through the day's intake of money and completed questionnaires. Ginsburg, who wants to go to Harvard next year, spends 70 hours a week at the office.
New Projects
With their Avco 1790 computer humming through thousands of responses on a quiet street in Wilmington, Tarr, Crump, and Ginsburg seem anxious to get on to other things. For instance, there are the 200 page movie script and 30 capsule plots for a T.V. situation comedy that Crump's roommate, John P. Bochner '66, has written on the match theme. Ginsburg is Bochner's agent, and he is now trying to get both the movie and the T.V. series produced. From the "fabulous contacts". Tarr says were established throughout the country this summer, the corporation is beginning to inundate the continental U.S. with offices. There are professionals--lawyers, researchers, public relations firms--everywhere in the organization.
Besides all this, Operation Match is due soon to hit the high schools. Cap Weinberger '68, their successful San Francisco manager, is in charge of this operation and is optimistic. "We have ten test areas laid out throughout the country," Weinberger says. "I don't know just how we'll work it, but its got to be done as inoffensively as possible. Perhaps we'll approach student councils, or state student council associations, or maybe even the PTA."
Tarr thinks colleges who want to match freshmen roommates, and businesses who want to select personnel, will provide the next market for Compatibility Research. He has hired a research company called Potentials, Inc.--a group of new Ph.D's from the University's Psychology and Soc Rel departments--to work on the questionnaires for these areas as well as for the high school match.
Its difficult to tell where Operation Match will go after this. Some have suggested that Compatibility Research try to arrange marriages. "But we don't find that very interesting," Ginsburg replies. Prospects for financial success this year are so promising (Ginsburg estimates, with probably some exaggeration, an intake of $1.5 million by March) that it no longer is reasonable to be an amused skeptic about Operation Match.
There is no denying that Tarr, Crump, and Ginsburg have, before anyone else, developed a very interesting, very profitable by-product of the modern technological revolution. Their drive and foresight have been proven, and seems like the future may belie the outcome Krump contemplated in another one of his tunes:
Well for goodness sake,
Old heart-ache.
Computer you hurt me, hurt me bad.
Computer blues.