From the «fond memories» department:
Feed: OSnews
Title: The only PC ever shipped with BeOS preinstalled
Author: Thom Holwerda
Date: Sat, 15 Jul 2023 14:27:08 -0400
Link: https://www.osnews.com/story/136392/the-only-pc-ever-shipped-with-beos-preinstalled/

As a former BeOS user and fan(atic), I consider myself quite knowledgeable on
the subject, but as I was watching the latest Micheal MJD video about BeOS[1], I
learned something new I had never heard of before. It’s common knowledge that Be
actively tried to court x86 OEMs to bundle BeOS alongside Windows in a dual-boot
configuration. However, these efforts fell apart as soon as Microsoft caught
wind of it and Redmond sent representatives to these OEMs to, shall we say,
politely discourage them from doing so. I thought this is where this story ended
– the OEMs ghosted Be, and no PC with BeOS preinstalled ever shipped.

But in his video, Micheal MJD mentions that at least one OEM did actually ship
BeOS preinstalled alongside Windows – Hitachi. However, while the company
technically shipped BeOS, it still wanted to appease Microsoft’s goons
representatives, and so Hitachi just… Disabled the special boot loader that
would’ve allowed users to pick BeOS at boot. BeOS was technically installed and
took up a part of the hard drive of every one of these machines shipped, but
unless you followed a set of detailed instructions posted by Be online, using a
BeOS boot floppy, you wouldn’t be able to actually boot into BeOS.

Trying to find more information about this, I ended up at the article archive of
Scot Hacker, author of, among other things, The BeOS Bible. In 2001, Hacker
wrote the post “He who controls the boot loader[2]“, in response to the news
that Be had been acquired by Palm:

In the 1998-1999 timeframe, ready to prime the pump with their desktop
offering, Be offered BeOS for free to any major computer manufacturer willing
to pre-install BeOS on machines alongside Windows. Although few in the Be
community ever knew about the discussions, Gassée says that Be was engaged in
enthusiastic discussions with Dell, Compaq, Micron, and Hitachi. Taken
together, pre-installation arrangements with vendors of this magnitude could
have had a major impact on the future of Be and BeOS. But of the four, only
Hitachi actually shipped a machine with BeOS pre-installed. The rest
apparently backed off after a closer reading of the fine print in their
Microsoft Windows License agreements. Hitachi did ship a line of machines (the
Flora Prius) with BeOS pre-installed, but made changes to the bootloader —
rendering BeOS invisible to the consumer — before shipping. Apparently,
Hitachi received a little visit from Microsoft just before shipping the Flora
Prius, and were reminded of the terms of the license.

Be was forced to post detailed instructions[3] [ed. note: dead link, here’s a
new link[4]] on their web site explaining to customers how to unhide their
hidden BeOS partitions. It is likely that most Flora Prius owners never even
saw the BeOS installations to which they were entitled.

So clearly, this information has been out there since at least 2001 – I had just
never heard of it. There’s countless references to Hacker’s article out there as
well, so it’s not like it’s some deeply hidden secret nobody was aware of. I, of
course, dove into our own archives and… For the love of KDL, we even linked to
Hacker’s article[5]. I wasn’t working for OSNews at the time – this was about
4-5 years before I came on as Managing Editor – but I find it highly
entertaining this was already part of OSNews lore.

In any event, I’m wondering if this makes Hitachi the only OEM to have ever
shipped a computer with BeOS preinstalled. Several Mac clone makers put a BeOS
installation CD in the box of their machines, but I don’t think any of them ever
shipped machines with BeOS preinstalled. Even if they did, Hitachi would still
be the only x86 OEM to have ever shipped BeOS preinstalled, and that, too, is
incredibly noteworthy.

Of course, I now have to try and find a working example of this Hitachi Flora
Prius[6] computer line. They were apparently only sold in Japan, so the odds of
finding one anywhere seem slim, at best. It doesn’t help that most people who
bought one of these had no idea BeOS was installed or what BeOS even was, so the
historical significance was lost on them. I also think these weren’t
particularly noteworthy computers otherwise – most likely one of the many
dime-a-dozen beige boxes sold all over the world. Searches on eBay and Japanese
auction sites yield no results.

We really need to find a working example of a Hitachi Flora Prius with BeOS
preinstalled. We need to image its hard drive for posterity on Archive.org, and
I want to see it running – either on YouTube or in real life, I don’t care. This
is a piece of computing history that needs to be preserved.

Links:
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MzosnPSETzk (link)
[2]: https://birdhouse.org/beos/byte/30-bootloader/ (link)
[3]: http://www-classic.be.com/support/guides/hitachi_boot.html (link)
[4]: http://testou.free.fr/www.beatjapan.org/mirror/www.be.com/support/guides/hitachi_boot.html (link)
[5]: https://www.osnews.com/story/67/be-speaks-out-on-microsoft-bootloader-practices/ (link)
[6]: https://www.hitachi.com/New/cnews/E/1998/981111B.html (link)

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I sure wish Usenet were owned by a petulant billionaire shitposter