> the pre-release version of the Pegasos mainboard was primarily a tool for testing MorphOS.

But this kind of opposes the idea that the Betatester was "combinations of pre-release versions of the Pegasos as well as pre-release versions of MorphOS", doesn't it? Either the tester is the Pegasos board that is used to test the testee MorphOS OR the tester is the combination of Pegasos board and MorphOS (which begs the question what the testee is) ;-)

> there was no general expectation that testers would have the required capabilities
> to correctly identify and report hardware bugs

Testers would report bugs (e.g. data corruption) by describing the observable end result and what they did to get this result, so that it's repeatable for the receiver of the report. They wouldn't have to know whether it's a software bug or a hardware bug in order to file that report.