biorhythm.com
From SuperBio to biorhythm.com
biorhythm.com is the latest stage of a biorhythm program that began about forty years ago as DOS shareware.
SuperBio: biorhythm on DOS
In the mid-1980s SuperBio was created, a biorhythm program for MS-DOS developed with TurboGraphics. It was distributed as shareware: you could try it and pass it on for free, and if you liked it you paid a registration fee directly to the author. Home computers and the first PCs made the calculation available to everyone, with the curves drawn as graphics on screen or on a dot-matrix printer.
WinBio: the move to Windows
In 1994 WinBio followed for Windows 3.x, written with Borland tools. WinBio showed the three curves as a monthly overview, marked the critical days and spoke German, English, Italian and Spanish – the languages biorhythm.com offers again today. The curve colours in today’s calculator are taken from WinBio.
WinBio was shareware too. Registration cost around 30 Deutschmarks and could be done by letter, fax or via CompuServe; payment was by Eurocheque, credit card or cash in a registered letter. Registered users received extra features: customisable curves, a detailed analysis of each day’s constellation and the partner comparison. For practices and institutions there was a commercial version that could manage any number of birth dates and print readings for several months. In 1995 new versions were already available on the still young World Wide Web, on a page of the University of Münster.
biorhythm.com: the successor
More than thirty years later the calculator runs in the browser, on the phone and as an installable app. The mathematics has stayed the same, but some things are new: the calculation stays entirely on your device, the display adapts to any screen, and a short daily summary puts the curves into words. The partner comparison and the detailed daily analysis – back then the reward for registering – are set to return here as well.