"MICHAELSOFT BINBOWS" isn't what you think it is

this video is brought to you by keeps microsoft bimbos [Music] this image for decades has been basically the poster child for what constitutes a crappy off-brand pointed to time and time again as a classic example of a bootleg knockoff thing heck on the subreddit are crappy off brands microsoft bimbos is notorious for being one of the most common repos in the history of the sub now i love this image i have always loved this image and as weird as it is to think about i've technically loved this image for most of my life it's one of the earliest funny images i remember seeing on the internet and to this day just hearing or seeing the words microsoft bimbos still makes me lose it now they say nothing ruins a joke like explaining it so i'm not even gonna try which is a relief i guess because i don't think i could even articulate why microsoft bimbos is so damn funny to me like just on a basic phonetic level the phrase microsoft bimbos is i think inherently hilarious just a purely nonsensical phrase likely the result of a mistranslation or was it [Music] the question i want to pose to you today is what if microsoft bimbos isn't nonsense what if all the millions of people who have shared and enjoyed this image over the years and shrugged it off as a funny crappy off-brand what if far-fetched though it may sound virtually everyone on the internet was wrong and microsoft bimbos actually meant something [Music] and hey while we're throwing out questions here here's one that doesn't get asked enough what the hell was microsoft bimbos was it a company a bootleg operating system what what was it specifically and last but not least where was it where was this enormous multi-foot microsoft bimbos sign and perhaps most crucial of all was this photo real with only one photo of michael self bimbo's in existence you kind of got to ask yourself at a certain point did it ever really exist at all or was this whole thing just a silly early internet photoshop job that spiraled way out of control today i intend to answer each and every one of these questions or die trying this is the story of microsoft bimbos so let's jump right into my first point what does microsoft bimbos mean if it means anything at all at first glance you can see how the average english-speaking person myself included would just automatically assume that this is a lazy knockoff of microsoft windows with some letters shuffled around you know the classic change up the homework a bit so it's not obvious you copied thing like off brands so often tend to do but that's not what's going on here not by a long shot microsoft bimbos in fact is not nonsense these words weren't chosen at random and if you dig a little deeper you'll see what i mean let's quickly dive in and just translate some of the japanese text on this image the katakana at the very top of this banner says chuko pasokan and patsu shop basically used pc and parts shop meanwhile the enormous kanji on the left of the banner reads gekiyasu which means cheap or bargain price so at this point we're getting a clearer picture of what this was right it was a used shop that sold pc parts but i hear you screaming why microsoft bimbos so here's my favorite part bimbo is actually a japanese word meaning poor or poverty so in actuality it's a bilingual pun they've combined the english word windows and the japanese word bimbo to make bimbos 99.9 of people who see this image don't get this it's not a typo or a knockoff or an error it's a pun a play on words suggesting hey if you're broke come by and check out our dirt cheap used pc parts so at this point i think the elephant in the room is microsoft well here's what i can tell you in japan microsoft's name is written like this mikurosafuto now that name consists of seven katakana ma e now here's where it gets a little speculative michael is an incredibly common english name and it's one of those names that is so prevalent in western culture that it's actually seeped its way into the lexicon in japan for a great example of what i'm talking about look at the p lander z song so many mike which is literally about how confusing it is that all americans seem to be named [Music] michael [Music] so because michael is such a common name among gaijin it's a name that japanese people are all too familiar with writing out in katakana and when you write the name michael out in katakana you end up with this now one big difference between japanese and english is that spoken japanese is tied incredibly closely to written japanese and it affects the way their puns work the reason microsoft is an effective pun in japanese is because you only have to change two katakana to make it work despite the fact that michael and micro are extremely different looking words in english in fact at the bottom of the sign that's what that katakana says it says microsoft so that's two questions down what microsoft bimbos means it's a pun and what microsoft bimbos was a used computer gear shop but that still leaves one glaring question where is this place located besides japan i mean if this place exists at all where is it is it still there like for real drop a pin like i know some melee players who would pay real large sums of money to get their hands on those crt monitors all right so just after looking into this for a while i initially concluded that this would be impossible to answer i have a lot of videos that kind of fizzle out this way where i get halfway through solving a mystery or answering a question and then surrender to the fact that it's unknowable punching microsoft bimbos into google maps results in of course nothing and on reflection trying to find info about microsoft bimbos was tricky for two reasons i think first the ubiquitousness of this image this image is all over the internet it's been uploaded to every single funny picture website complete with their watermark slapped on it over and over and over that makes it incredibly hard to track down [Music] which leads me to the second reason it's almost impossible to research microsoft bimbos the age of this image i mean remember this photo is older than youtube older than reddit and older than frankly a significant chunk of the people watching this video right now it's been reposted over and over and over for two decades meaning this image has circulated so much that it has long long since become completely detached from its source anytime you see the microsoft bimbo's image you're looking at a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy every time you see this image it's been reposted and recompressed dozens likely even hundreds of times and it shows while working on this video i must have looked at three or four hundred variations of this single image and the actual underlying content was always exactly the same it's this one specific photo from this one specific angle with almost no hints about where this was taken beyond that it was somewhere in japan which by the way is a much bigger country than you think it is i know many of you are probably imagining like hawaii but dude japan is huge like japan in its totality is 150 000 square miles the city of tokyo alone has over 1.9 million buildings in it it's a series of islands but it's a series of very big islands all right i was looking for a microsoft bimbos needle in a japan sized haystack and with no info anywhere on google and two decades of digital atrophy standing between me and microsoft bimbos trying to find this one specific building was a daunting task but i trudged onward and i had kept looking at this same image over and over and over until finally i made an incredible [Music] discovery i came across what i believe to be the first ever use of the phrase microsoft bimbos in the entire history of the internet [Music] this is a japanese website called alf's room active since all the way back in 1997 alf's room is a little-known personal blog belonging to a 51 year old japanese man named dachi yoshinori who's been steadily updating the website since he launched it in 1997 almost 24 years ago now there's a ton of personality in this website not only is it aesthetically delightful with a design deeply evocative of the early 90s internet but the whole site is manned and hosted by alf a fictional character created by adachi to be the website's image character basically alph is the mascot of this page now from browsing elf's room you learn a lot about adachi and his hobbies the man is fascinated with trains video games photography music and for each of these subjects adachi has built out separate pages on the site which he calls rooms maybe you can hear it in my voice but i love this website and i definitely recommend you explore it for yourself at some point but the thing we're interested in today is this a subsection of alf's room called exhibition room inside of this page is another sub page labeled kore nandaro which i asked my japanese friend maru about to just kind of gauge the tone and he described it as meaning like hmm what is this thanks maru so this page is a page where alph and his friend would two fictional characters as a reminder discuss a variety of quote strange unusual and mysterious things this is my favorite section of the site because it reveals adachi to be an eccentric and deeply fastidious man who's traveled all over japan and beyond sometimes returning to the same place decades apart and noting the changes so as an example there's one page on here about this monorail station in kanagawa in 1999 adachi noticed that for some reason at the end of this line there are three potted plants placed at the terminus of the railway so he took a photo of it when adachi got home he pulled up a video he took at that same kanagawa station in 1992 and discovered that the flower pots were in that footage as well and when he returned in 2002 he found that they were still there but when he went back in 2007 they were gone so like really really particular documenting of things that the average person might not notice or care about so among all these odds and ends on the kore nani daro page is a page entitled you guessed it microsoft bimbos so i i click on this page not really knowing what to expect and what i see literally made me gasp out loud there was lo and behold a never before seen photo of microsoft bimbos i hope i'm effectively communicating what a huge deal this is in all my research on microsoft bimbos i didn't see this photo once this was a hitherto unseen angle of the microsoft binbows building giving us a much better look at the building itself including the signage and the triangular green awning on the front and while i'm sure someone somewhere on the internet has seen this photo before it still completely blew my mind that this existed at all it seemed like barely anybody was aware of it let's see what adachi has to say about this picture spoken vicariously through his ocs courtesy of google translate used pc and partshop microsoft bimbos it's a suspicious name by all means it's a parody of microsoft windows it's a used pc and part shop isn't it in other words it's a hardware store right that's true but the name is microsoft is that okay with such a name the logo mark is just the reverse of the windows one i think microsoft will complain it wouldn't be strange to come however it seems that the store closed around the end of 2002 now that last line is fascinating because it means that according to adachi the shop is long gone having shuttered almost 20 years ago and as interesting as that piece of trivia is it's still not my favorite thing on this page see at the top of every one of the nandoro pages adachi has meticulously logged two pieces of information first the date that he took the photo in question and second of all the shooting location the dates for this one july 20th 2001 and the shooting location somewhere called kawaiigi machi now odds are you haven't heard of kawaiigimachi i i certainly hadn't it's a tiny town really more of a neighborhood located about two hours outside of tokyo within meibashi city with a population of barely a thousand households and no train station to speak of now of course after reading adachi's blog post i went to google maps and pulled up koigimachi and saw this and while it's still a pretty big expanse of terrain finding microsoft bimbos was starting to feel like a possibility still with no clues as to where within this maze the remains of microsoft bimbos might be found this task felt daunting and with the pandemic in japan still ongoing booking a ticket and getting on a flight to tokyo is still not an option for me so i racked my brain about what the next best thing would be to going there in person one of the first ideas i had was to just reach out to adachi directly after all adachi is the only guy on earth who i know saw microsoft bimbos with his own two eyes maybe he remembered where exactly it was or could help point me in the right direction now adachi has a disclaimer on his website saying he doesn't reply to emails and languages other than japanese but i figured i should at least try so hastily i threw together a message to adachi dumped it into google translate and fired it off and unsurprisingly i didn't hear back from him i kept thinking how can i go to japan without going to japan and then it hit me so i opened steam and downloaded google earth vr in search of answers see anyone who's aimlessly clicked around in google street view for a while knows that it can get pretty disorienting pretty fast my hope here was that the vr component of google earth vr would on some level help me establish a sense of direction of familiarity to better help me ground myself and capture the feeling of wandering around taking in the sights a feeling that believe it or not i have actually found myself missing quite a bit since the beginning of the pandemic so at 1 30 a.m last friday i dove in [Music] so [Music] before diving down to earth i had one last thing to do i had to arm myself i took the only two photos of microsoft bimbos in existence the legendary original and the newly discovered one that adachi provided affixed them to my left arm and began my descent [Music] [Applause] [Music] it was time for the hunt to begin i'm still not sure how it happened but somehow i was able to clip through the surface of the earth a deep sense of dread formed in the pit of my stomach and i couldn't shake the feeling that some sort of eldritch horrors awaited me on the other end of this journey luckily though none of that happened and i had a really great time in google earth vr [Music] [Music] hovering above hundreds and hundreds of houses and buildings with no clear sense of where to start was pretty daunting so i picked a random spot in kawagiemachi and just started exploring [Music] so i don't know if you've used google earth vr before but a lot of people myself included find it to be a pretty incredible and emotional and transporting experience one of my favorite things to do when showing somebody vr for the first time is dropping them into this game and taking them to some of their favorite places their childhood home their favorite vacation spot for the right person taken to the right place damn i sound like the g-man the right person in the right place can make all the different no but like for real putting the right person in google earth vr can have some pretty genuinely emotional results it's just like this is not a perspective that i knew that i wanted but it's like the just the most entertaining possible thing [Music] and i'll be damned if my visit to quagi kwagimachi did not perfectly fit that description and i can't really put my finger on what it was maybe it was the stillness of this street view imagery maybe it was the ambient music maybe it was the really shockingly high quality photography that google japan uses in their street view but all these elements came together to really give me the feeling that i was wandering through a sleepy japanese neighborhood i slowly strolled through koagi machi and just took in the sights i walked past an elementary school decorated with the children's superhero anpanman past an old boarded up overgrown bicycle shop a surprisingly large arcade ooh they got tuna them over there they got initial d there was so much life in these still photos like an old man kind of wandering around or some kids on their way to school even like kind of silly unexpected stuff like a hello kitty branded self-storage facility it all kind of brought me back to that feeling of being in japan again and as a guy who's been to japan a bunch of times i don't think i fully grasped how therapeutic and important to me those trips to japan have been until this weird free piece of software from 2016 brought me right back there it was like all at once the gravity of the emotional impact it's had on me not being able to go to japan and and the the weight and the importance that i had kind of placed on these trips like it all kind of hit me at once and um like like okay i'll put it like this i i had hopped into koagi machi expecting it to be like this tedious labyrinth in experience where i'm like wandering around getting lost and confused and i'd quickly get frustrated and bored and instead i had been totally blindsided by this like beautiful nostalgic and surprisingly powerful experience i don't i don't know what else to call it it it legitimately knocked me on my ass a little bit at one point i realized i'd actually gotten so immersed in the atmosphere of being back in japan that i had accidentally wandered like a full mile outside of kwaghimachi and had to turn around and go back so i kept walking i walked leisurely through this town i'd never been to in a country i've been to a lot of times occasionally glancing at my wrist when i came across a building that resembled michael's off bimbos and over the next hour that happened a lot like i lost track of how many times i would wander up to a building kind of get like a jolt of excitement that it could be the right one and then glance back and forth at the photos on my arm a couple times and realized that i was mistaken that the brick work was slightly different or the windows didn't quite line up and after a little bit that cycle began to wear on me a little like it got a little exhausting feeling this spark of hope that i had found microsoft bimbos and then the gradual realization that this was not in fact microsoft bimbos it began to wear on me a little bit and like i always knew this was a long shot all right like somewhere deep inside i knew that there was a very real likelihood that nothing recognizable from the original building remained that maybe it had been retiled or repainted or the signature green awning that you see in the dachi's photo had been torn down or hell maybe the entire building had been demolished i mean none of these were off the table it had been 20 years since the tragic closure of microsoft bimbos who's to say there was any trace of that building left anywhere but also i just didn't want to ruin the feeling this gave me i knew that the longer i spent wandering aimlessly through this town the more the magic that i was feeling the magic of this experience would begin to dissipate and that's not what i wanted to happen so i decided to throw in the towel i after spending an hour in there i it was a nice try but the odds that i'd somehow stumble across the right building with my naked eye seemed pretty low if that building even existed at all so i gave up or rather i was about to give up and then this happened no way no way no way wait wait a minute wait a minute no dude i found it yeah the windows match up perfectly the thing that that i was freaking out about actually was the awning there which is exactly the same no way no way no way [Music] oh my god i want to go in the parking lot so bad i found it i found it in vr that's so awesome oh my god [Music] i had done it through some combination of diligence and sheer dumb luck i had found it no way man bro i if i take this headset off and it's not still recording i'm gonna kill myself i looked back and forth between the photos and this building and i can't describe how good it felt when it all clicked into place like everything lined up the triangular awning from adachi's photo which after decades of exposure to the elements had faded to a very faint green color the pillar that lined up and of course that same dusty set of four microsoft bimbos they hadn't changed a bit i could not stop smiling even telling the story now i can't stop smiling it was a crazy feeling standing there or virtually standing there in precisely the same spot that adachi had stood in 20 years earlier at the exact site of one of the most beloved and misunderstood images on the entire internet that's exactly where i was and thanks in large part to the thorough documentation provided by adachi yoshinori we have honed in on the hallowed ground where microsoft bimbos once loomed i couldn't even look at it without laughing this creature is but i'm so happy at 36 degrees 22 minutes 21.7 seconds north and 139 degrees 3 minutes and 30.2 seconds east is this building the hallowed ground where microsoft bimbos once stood [Music] if you'd like you can visit it for yourself in google maps there's a link in the description right underneath the subscribe button or once tourism opens back up maybe even head there in person and pay your respects to this legendary landmark irl i know i will the experience i've had over the past month looking into this is why i love the internet like here we have this japanese guy meticulously documenting his entire life online for decades talking to as best i can tell virtually nobody and yet years and years and years later one of this man's hundreds of blog entries wound up proving instrumental to helping some guy halfway across the planet 20 years in the future solve a pretty inconsequential mystery without adachi's photo and the location he posted there's no way i would have found this he provided me with the sole piece of original writing on the entire internet from somebody who actually visited microsoft bimbos in person i had to tell somebody so i reached out to the only friend of mine who i knew would still be awake my japanese friend maru the morning after going on this little vr adventure i woke up to discover that i had received an email from adachi here's what he had to say hello nick i'm sorry for the late reply the photos in this page are taken by me however i have never been inside just by looking at it from the outside i have never shopped unfortunately there is no more information available i am sorry that i cannot be a help alf's room manager yoshinori adachi it's funny that he ended it that way saying i'm sorry that i cannot be a help because little did he know he was unbelievably helpful in solving this mystery so yoshinori adachi if you're watching this thank you um thank you for maintaining elf's room for 33 years thank you for your fastidiousness in documenting the little things in life that caught your eye your unwavering dedication to taking the things that interest you and putting them on the internet um led to one of the highlights of my year and it's everyone else watching this be like adachi if there's something interesting to you if there's something you like if there's something that catches your eye or that you want to share or that you find fascinating just put it on the internet make the blog or the youtube video or the song or whatever the thing is that you've been thinking about making and then talking yourself out of because you think no one's gonna care or no one's ever gonna see it please i'm begging you make it anyway make it anyway and put it out there because you never know who it's going to reach or how it's going to help them thanks for watching and have a good weekend [Music] hey one last thing i i'm getting perilously close to hitting 1 million subscribers which is insane if you're watching this channel and you enjoyed this video and you made it all the way to the end i'd love it if you'd consider subscribing i have a video i have a video that i'm working on for when i hit 1 million that i'm like dying to release and also i'm scared that it's not going to be ready in time so i have cleared the rest of this month to finish this thing it's a project many years in the making and that's all i'm gonna say about it for now oh also i i have developed a crippling addiction to streaming on twitch [Music] i broke the table the book is on the table i now stream basically every morning at 10 a.m to play the track mania track of the day long story but if you tune in i'll explain it um and it's it's been incredibly fun we have a really great little group of people there it's so much more casual and chill and conversational than streaming on youtube so i'm gonna keep doing that because frankly i love it oh also as a direct result of not releasing a big video last month i also didn't release a bonus video last month so my apologies on that you will get two bonus videos this month i promise one of them is up now it's the full very lightly edited cut of me wandering through kogimachi including the moment where i stumbled upon the site of microsoft bimbos so that sounds pleasant to you it's like a fun little cozy asmr thing i figured i might as well give you all that so yeah if you click join on this channel you get access to that and a bunch of other bonus videos including commentary tracks full interviews and all and by the way the bonus video that will be going up alongside the 1 million subscriber video is is really some that's all i'm gonna say um like i got a lot of questions from you all about the best way to support this channel so if you wanna support this channel the absolute best way to do it is clicking the join button i appreciate each and every one of you who has done that um it really enables me to keep making these high effort dense weird videos at exactly the pace i want so yeah thank you so here's an interesting statistic according to youtube analytics two out of every three people watching this video are guys and here's another statistic two out of every three men will at some point their lives experience some form of male pattern baldness before age 35. another fun fact according to youtube only 14 of you all are subscribed to me so maybe i don't know consider doing something about that anyways that's neither here nor there if you're one of the majority of men doomed to future hair loss one of the most affordable ways you can help prevent that fate is through keeps now maybe you're thinking but nick i haven't even started losing my hair that's actually kind of the point the number one way to prevent hair loss is prevention before the hair loss begins here's how it 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Channel: Nick Robinson

Views: 707,179

Rating: 4.9445062 out of 5

Keywords:

Id: yDzAAjzbV5g

Length: 34min 25sec (2065 seconds)

Published: Sun May 16 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/CaptainChaos_88]

Never seen this image until now. lol

[u/Siellus]

Wish I could make a 34 minute video about something nobody will care about.

[u/Nevermind04]

I have no idea why I love videos like this so much. I don't care about the subject matter at all, but highly specialized interests are infectious.

[u/Fartmatic]

I'm not sure that video really needed to be 34 minutes long.

Man looks on Google Earth VR for building where the Michaelsoft Binbows pic came from, finds it at 24:39

[u/LockeNCole]

Pretty sure we've known about this place since 2010.

[u/[deleted]]

Reminds to the one about finding out where the malcom in the middle video came from.

Spends 5 minutes hyping up a mystery youd never heard of and then 10 minutes on a bizarre mostly pointless journey before revealing that someone had already solved the mystery and that it never really was a mystery.

Mind you I haven't watched it all