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, 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“, 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 [ed. note: dead link, here’s a new link] 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. 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 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.
The extent of microsoft’s mafia strong arming tactics had no bounds in those days. Microsoft used their monopoly to contractually block vendors from carrying competing products, the strategy was so effective they controlled nearly the whole market. I always felt that the DOJ let microsoft get off scot-free considering the damage that microsoft had intentionally done to the market. As mentioned in the “he who controls the bootloader” article, they were too preoccupied with browsers even as microsoft’s monopoly abuses were far broader than this. Even though a long time has passed we still haven’t completely recovered. Quite annoyingly, even to this day, the microsoft tax still exists on many hardware sales and it continues to harm alternatives. This sort of thing should have been made illegal in the 90s.
> they controlled nearly the whole market.
I try to explain to my kids how different the computer market was in the late 90s / early 2000s. Microsoft Windows was LITERALLY IT, anything else (Mac, and especially Linux) was so infinitesimally small as to be non-existent. I started using Linux exclusively in 2001, and it was huge to me that it was possible in a Windows world. My kids take it for granted that they can just use my Linux computer for anything these days, or their Chromebooks at school, or Android and iOS for most things as well. It makes me smile.
I’m still bitter at Microsoft for what they did to people’s perception of what using a computer should be like. “Oh, it’s normal that the computer gets slow after a few hours, just reboot it and it’s fine”, or “It’s good to re-install the OS once a year to clean it up.” THESE THINGS ARE NOT NORMAL if you have a solid, well designed OS. Grrr… >_<
Wow. Who would have thought M$ would have been so customer/OEM hostile?
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I may be splitting hair here, but a version of BeOS did ship with Sony eVilla. Though classed as an internet appliance, this was a full x86-compatible PC.
It was shipped with BeIA.
Correct. Which was BeOS reduced in size to fit the onboard storage and exposing a web browser interface for use. Basically what ChromeOS is today.
I was an AM CURRENTLY a HUGE fan of BeOS. I still have my boxes and disks and everything for the two versions of BeOS box sets that I bought about 1995 and I knew about Hitachi being the only company willing to put BeOS on a computer and sell it to the public. Well “public” being if you lived in Japan which I didn’t. I lived and live in the Seattle, WA area of the world.
It was told to me by someone that this started the antitrust law suit against Microsoft. That the federal government caught wind of Microsoft’s goons (and that is a VERY good description of them) showing companies the contract they had signed that said you could ONLY load MS OSs on computers.
The feds asked for companies to keep anything of any kind that they could from Microsoft about this subject and hand it over to them and once they had gotten “enough” they filed the lawsuit against Microsoft. That’s what I was told. I could be wrong or “they” could have been wrong but it was a pretty reliable source at the time. I just don’t remember who it was.
I recently saw how Microsoft has lost more % of the OS market to Linux, Mac and “other” OSs and I can’t help but smile. But I won’t truly be happy until Microsoft’s profits are so low that they have to file bankruptcy. That couldn’t happen to a better company in my opinion.
Sabon,
I think you mean so low that apple have to come bail them out 🙂
Alas they’ve still got a huge desktop and office monopoly so I don’t think that will be happening soon. Whenever they need to shore up their profits they can just turn to the silicon valley trick of laying off a few thousand employees. Their AI business is ultimately going to amplify this layoffs -> corporate profit equation.
No, I mean that losses are so large that all of the world’s companies together could not save Microsoft. THAT would be a great day!
Personally I don’t care which OS ends up having the largest share as long as:
1) It is secure in that it stores its data on the device where the company making the OS cannot access my data and nobody else can either.
2) It is a joy to use.
Actually there is a lot more but basically it would be the opposite of M$.
Sabon,
My comment was intended as a joke in reference to microsoft bailing out apple with a cash infusion a few decades ago.
While I’m not a fan of MS, personally I don’t necessarily feel better about google or apple. They all share the incentive of moving away from user independence and untethered freedoms.
The issue was not about MS preventing other OS from being installed on the manufacturer’s computer. But rather than the manufacturers had to pay for an MS license, regardless of whether or not the machine was to have DOS/Windows installed out of factory. This is, the license forced the manufacturer to pay for all the machines they produced, not just those that were intended for DOS/Windows. Which in turn made the prospect of installing anything else less attractive.
I think that was one of the reasons why MS was forced to reimburse linux users from unused licenses. But the manufacturers had already added that cost to the PCs they sold, so they didn’t necessarily care.
I also think, although I could be wrong since I was a wee lad back then, that most of the antitrust case was regarding all the bundling up of technologies that MS put on top of Windows that made their own products compete better against 3rd party alternatives. Especially during the days where they tried to make internet explorer integral part of the OS, to shut out Netscape et al. I think similar suits had been filed by productivity houses like WordPerfect/Lotus claiming that MS’s office suite team had access to APIs from the OS division, that they did not.
And before that there were a bunch of lawsuits against Microsoft regarding the look and feel of windows.
Licensing has traditionally been a scummy business. I think both of Bill Gates parents were corporate lawyers, so that apple didn’t fall far from the tree. Friends, who worked at MS, described the place as being a law office that makes software on the side.
javiercero1.
It was actually worse than that. BeOS wanted OEMs to dual boot BeOS. Microsoft were still being paid for windows licenses. However OEMs turned around and said microsoft were threatening to raise windows licensing costs if they dual booted BeOS. The “He Who Controls the Bootloader” (link in the article) is quite informative.
BeOS sued over this and MS settled for $23M. I think many of us are curious about what would have happened if the case had gone to completion, but since BeOS had already failed by that time a long drawn out court case probably wasn’t desired. It was too late to save BeOS.
“The issue was not about MS preventing other OS from being installed on the manufacturer’s computer. But rather than the manufacturers had to pay for an MS license, regardless of whether or not the machine was to have DOS/Windows installed out of factory.”
Actually, BOTH are true.
A UK retailer sold rebadged Motorola Mac Clones with BeOS preinstalled
https://everymac.com/systems/compware/cities/bmachine.html
Also, there’s Edirol editing workstations, a few early video ad display systems from a company that I’ve forgotten the name of, and TuneTracker prebuilt systems that were sold – but not to retail channels like this and the Hitachi
TuneTracker now ship Haiku as their OS. This puts Haiku in the odd position of being supported commercial software, without an official stable release.
Lovely story.