Michaelsoft Binbows 98 — The Official Home Page

★★★ HOT! Binbows 98 Second Edition — boots on any UEFI machine from the last 15 years ★★★ Now with a recovery console that reads your actual disc ★★★ FETCH renders the flag in code page 437 ★★★ Y2K Ready* (*mostly) ★★★ There is still no EXIT ★★★

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Animated 88x31 Binbows web badge
Link us. It's 1998, that's how this works.

Binbows 98: an operating system, technically

Binbows is a bootable disc image for people who miss beige computers, grey dialog boxes and the specific sound a hard drive makes when it is thinking very hard about nothing. It boots straight off the firmware — no host operating system involved — shows you a splash screen, crashes on purpose, and leaves you at a command prompt that is real enough to read your actual disc.

The boot screen. The bar moves.

Experience the Power of Binbows 98!

The most stable and fastest Binbows yet, largely because there is not much of it. Three and a bit megabytes on a disc, and it reaches a command prompt faster than your firmware reached the boot menu.

What's actually in there:

An animated boot splash, read from LOGO.SYS exactly like 1998 did it
A recovery console with line editing, command history and about twenty commands
DIR, CD, TYPE and VOL against the real boot volume — nothing canned
The IBM VGA 8x16 font, all 256 code page 437 glyphs, magnified to fit your panel

Download Now! Learn More

Included at no extra charge

Read off LOGO.SYS on the boot volume, exactly where 1998 kept it.

Bring your own — any uncompressed BMP is picked up on the next boot
Whole-pixel scaling, so 320x400 fills 1280x800 with no blur
The bar animates without a single pixel moving

C:\>_

Not a screenshot of a prompt. An actual prompt, running on firmware.

Line editing, backspace, history on the arrow keys, ESC to clear
DIR and TYPE read the medium you booted from
About forty Linux commands, recognised and individually declined

What is real and what is not

Every operating system should be clear about which half of it is the joke. Here is the split, stated plainly, because the interesting part is how much of it isn't:

Full product details Go straight to downloads

Runs fine in a virtual machine, which is where most people meet it these days — it just needs UEFI firmware rather than the legacy BIOS its costume suggests. See running Binbows in a VM.

What people are saying

★★★★★ "It booted."
— D., who had set expectations accordingly

★★★★☆ "Installed this on my work laptop. I no longer have a work laptop, but I stand by the decision."
— anonymous, for reasons that are now clear

★★★☆☆ "I typed sudo out of habit and it put me in my place. Personally. By name."
— a satisfied-ish user

★★★★★ "My dad walked past, saw the boot screen, and said 'oh, that one was good.' Ten out of ten."
— the highest praise this project will ever receive

🚧 UNDER CONSTRUCTION 🚧
More features coming soon! Bookmark this page! (Or tape it to your monitor.)

★ Awards & Recognition ★

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Best OS (Allegedly)

⭐

Editor's Coin Flip

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Top Download (From One PC)

Seen in print

Our advertising campaign ran in exactly one publication, once, and the publication has asked us not to name it again.* You can read the whole thing:

*It is on the ad. We are aware. Legal is aware.

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