About Michaelsoft Binbows

This whole thing started with a photograph of a shop. Everything since — the operating system, the ISO, this website, the fake error codes — is downstream of one sign in Japan.

The origin

Figure 1. The shop. 中古パソコン＆パーツSHOP — a used PC and parts store. The orange characters 激安 mean "extremely cheap." マイケルソフト is "Michaelsoft." ビンボウズ is "Binbows," which also happens to sound like 貧乏, meaning "poor."

That last detail is the whole joke and it wasn't ours. A used-computer shop in Japan named itself Michaelsoft Binbows — Michael instead of Micro, and a word that reads as both "Windows" and "broke." It is a better pun than anything on this website and it was painted on a building by people who sold secondhand towers for a living.

Somebody photographed it. The photograph went around the internet for two decades. The shop has since closed and the sign has since come down — but the building is still there, holding up the space where it was. The photograph outlived both, which is a very normal thing for a photograph to do and a very strange thing to think about.

To be completely clear: we did not invent Michaelsoft Binbows. We found it, like everyone else did, and then took it much further than was necessary.

Field trip

Site Visit — Scheduled _□×

Update: I'm going to the building this year. In person. The actual one, the one in the photograph, standing in front of it like a tourist at a monument — which, to be fair, is roughly what it is.

To be clear about what is waiting there: the sign is gone. That part is settled, and I am not flying anywhere hoping otherwise. The building, however, is still standing. So the plan is to fly a considerable distance to photograph a wall where a sign used to be, which I am aware is a strange thing to do, and which I am going to do anyway. There will be a photo and it will go on this page.

If you know what's currently at the address, or you've been yourself, [email protected]. Yes, that address works. Every address works — see the department directory.

Company history

Sometime in the 2000s

A shop in Japan puts up a sign. It is not trying to be a meme. This is what makes it work.

The 2010s

The photo circulates. It appears on forums, image boards, and eventually the kind of subreddit where people post pictures of signs. It never quite dies.

1998 (internally)

Michaelsoft Binbows Corporation is retroactively founded. Our corporate timeline runs on a different calendar and we ask that you respect it.

December 1998

Binbows 98 Second Edition ships. It is the second edition. There was no first edition. Auditing has been notified.

Today

The website you are reading. An ISO you can actually boot. A support page with error codes we made up but that behave suspiciously like real ones.

The future

Binbows ME. We've been warned. We're doing it anyway.

Who makes this

Binbows is built and maintained by lucya, who is one person, not a corporation, and who would like to gently repeat that.

Department	Staffing
Engineering	lucya
Design	lucya, in Affinity, at night
Marketing	one magazine advertisement, self-placed
Legal	the yellow box at the bottom of every page
Technical Support	an email address and good intentions
Human Resources	vacant, permanently, by design

Link to us

88×31 buttons, the correct unit of web citizenship. Save them to your own server — hotlinking is rude and it was rude in 1998 too.

	`binbows.gif` — the house badge. Take it.
	`lucya.png` — links to lucya.sh.
	`pride.png` — no joke attached to this one.

<!-- paste this on your page -->
<a href="https://binbows.net/">
  <img src="binbows.gif" width="88" height="31"
       alt="Michaelsoft Binbows">
</a>

Contact the relevant department

Michaelsoft operates a full departmental email system. Every address below is monitored, in the sense that they all arrive in the same inbox, which is checked when someone remembers. Route your enquiry to the appropriate team:

Michaelsoft Binbows department directory
Address	Handles
[email protected]	General enquiries, hellos, and people who just want to say they had this computer.
[email protected]	Technical support. Include your error code. Please include your error code.
[email protected]	New and exciting failure modes. We collect these the way other people collect stamps.
[email protected]	Tricks we missed on the using page. There are always more.
[email protected]	Offering to host the ISO. Genuinely appreciated.
[email protected]	Things the FAQ didn't answer. Good ones end up on the FAQ.
[email protected]	404s that are our fault. Almost all of them are our fault.
[email protected]	Purchasing enquiries. Every product is free, so this is a short conversation.
[email protected]	Careers at Michaelsoft. There are none. There is not even one.
[email protected]	Reserved for our shareholders, of whom there are zero, which makes quarterly calls efficient.
[email protected]	Media enquiries. We will absolutely give you a quote and it will not be useful.
[email protected]	Millennium bug concerns. Still staffed. See the compliance guide.
[email protected]	It looks like you're writing an email. Would you like help?
[email protected]	The 1998 classic. Complaints about the marquee tag go here and are ignored here.
[email protected]	Required by RFC 2142. We take standards compliance seriously exactly once, and this is it.
[email protected]	Legal. Takedowns, trademark concerns, anything a lawyer wrote. Not a binbows.net address on purpose.

How the department system works: binbows.net runs a catch-all, so every address in the table resolves — along with every address that isn't in the table. complaints@ works. ceo@ works. department.of.beige@ works. They all arrive in the same place. This is not a bug in our mail routing, it is our entire organisational chart.

Source & issues: github.com/lucya-astralis/binbows
Impressum & privacy policy: lucya.sh/legal
Personal site: lucya.sh
Postal address: we're going to say no

Best reasons to write, ranked: a photo of the shop, a correction to this page, a new failure mode, a mirror offer, a joke. We have never once regretted opening an email that turned out to be a photo of a beige tower.

Legal, in plain words

The yellow box below is the formal version. Here is the honest one:

This is a parody. It is not Microsoft, it is not affiliated with Microsoft, and it does not want to be mistaken for Microsoft.
"Microsoft" and "Windows" are their trademarks. We use the names only to make it clear what we are parodying, which is the point of parody.
The Binbows logo, artwork and site are ours. The badges are free to reuse. The photograph of the shop is of a real business that we did not create and do not claim.
Nothing here is a real product, real advice, or a real download of anyone else's software.

If you own something on this site and would rather it weren't here, [email protected] and it comes down. That's the whole process.

🚧 STILL HERE 🚧
Under construction since 1998 and not planning to finish.

🏢 Corporate facts