re: Graph: How most couples meet through the decades

Just for stupid people.

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She was glued to the computer screen chatting with people on Prodigy.

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I was an early online adopter and had Prodigy in 1990. Could've been me.

Although I was already talking shite on football message boards at the time and wasn't trolling for chicks.

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How did people meet online in 1980?

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Bulletin Boards and chat rooms have existed since the late 70s.

i tried something back in the day..okcupid i think? you had to answer like 300 questions in order to list your photo and i think i got bored 1/3 of the way through and was just clicking

i think the idea was it would match all your answers and feed it into some lame algorithm that would match you with someone just like you

i'm not sure a job interview is the right way to find someone you love to hang with.

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However, I'd guess that it isn't true, and people these days simply have more luck online.

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It’s basically this.

More precisely, dating has always been a numbers game first and foremost. Guys can do a lot of things to improve their odds of getting a girlfriend, but by far the easiest and most scaleable option is simply asking more girls out.

The Internet just greatly increases the number of girls you can ask out.

If in a span of six months you asked out two girls from church, three friends of friends, two girls from school, and three girls you met at bars… but then swiped on a few hundred profiles on Tinder and Bumble and got to ask out 30 girls from those apps… and at the end of six months you have a girlfriend, then just as a matter of basic statistics, where is the most likely place you met your girlfriend?

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How did people meet online in 1980?

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The old BBS systems, and services like CompuServe

We had bulletin boards and chat rooms in the early 80s.

But they were literally bulletin boards and chat rooms. Sometimes a bulletin board on a wall inside a chat room.

Facebook was around in 05, but limited to some universities. Probably only a small part of it.

There were also some pre social media Web 2.0 era dating sites like Match and eHarmony out there. And then I guess Craigslist……

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We had bulletin boards and chat rooms in the early 80s.

But they were literally bulletin boards and chat rooms. Sometimes a bulletin board on a wall inside a chat room.

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Bulletin Boards (WIKI)

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A bulletin board system (BBS), also called a computer bulletin board service (CBBS),[1] is a computer server running software that allowed users to connect to the system using a terminal program. Once logged in, the user could perform functions such as uploading and downloading software and data, reading news and bulletins, and exchanging messages with other users through public message boards and sometimes via direct chatting. In the early 1980s, message networks such as FidoNet were developed to provide services such as NetMail, which is similar to internet-based email.[2]


Similar functionality was available to most mainframe users, which might be considered a sort of ultra-local BBS when used in this fashion. Commercial systems, expressly intended to offer these features to the public, became available in the late 1970s and formed the online service market that lasted into the 1990s. One particularly influential example was PLATO, which had thousands of users by the late 1970s, many of whom used the messaging and chat room features of the system in the same way that would later become common on BBSes.

Many BBSes also offered online games in which users could compete with each other. BBSes with multiple phone lines often provided chat rooms, allowing users to interact with each other. Bulletin board systems were in many ways a precursor to the modern form of the World Wide Web, social networks, and other aspects of the Internet.

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