Categories: The 70s

Fairly O/T: The 1978 Kosmos Bio Clock + full manual download

above: the Kosmos Bio-Clock, and the more common Kosmos 1 biorhythm calculator circa (1978)

Download the complete manual for the 1978 Kosmos Bio-Clock:

The Kosmos Bio-Clock was a high-end desk calculator/clock/device for predicting your daily moods, abilities, and compatibility with any other person. What? Hey man, it was the 70s.

After becoming somewhat obsessed with this oddity, I tracked down a few examples, but they were impossible to use without a manual; and the manual, until I uploaded it today, was not available online. In the interest of keeping the weirder recesses of 1970s consumer culture alive, I tracked down a manual and painstakingly scanned it for you, fellow astral traveler.

I found the magazine at left while hunting for old sound equipment at estate sales last summer (same pile, IIRC: a complete 1982 TAMA catalog and an original Gibson EBO pickup. wtf). It’s a great read, smut-free, safe-for-work, ETC, with all the contrived settings and retouched photography that this publication is known for.

I learned about two things of note from the ‘book’: *Ariston Turntables, the poor-man’s Linn (I’ve since found a nice vintage Ariston for $40), and *this crazy fucking calculator that promises a solution to all life’s problems (math-and-non-math)

I am going to resist the urge to editorialize too much. Read the manual and come to your own conclusions. If you decide to buy one of these devices, be warned that I had to buy three in order to find an actually fully working example (nb: they all ‘turned on’ and ‘lit up’ despite not accepting input data so be wary of sellers’ claims). ALSO even when/if you get one that will actually accept data input, it SEEMS like this primitive computer is not Y2K compatible, so it can’t actually show you your biorhythm data for any date past 12/31/1999 (nb: please feel free to prove me wrong if you have a working example of this device and know better). Regardless, it works fine as a clock, calculator, and it will display Bio Compatability data for any two persons born before 12/31/1999.

If you can’t/wont’ spend the bread on a possibly-functional Bio-Clock, the much more common Kosmos 1 offers many of the same features minus the actual clock. I’ve been using this as my daily desk calculator and it makes a fine number-cruncher.

admin